The Strange Thing in Space
by freakinfarkle
Summary: The Satoshi, a voyaging spacecraft travelling through the cosmos in the event of locating inhabitable planets for Pokemon to flourish, inexplicably comes across a strange, glowing asteroid within the vacuum of space, spinning there restlessly as the entities trapped within it shake and rumble, ready for release. And Christopher Zanz is unintentionally tasked to help.
1. prologue

The Rock of Enigmas was always a place of solitude since the beginning of its creation. Placed far from the reaches of Earth, it eternally stagnated between Jupiter and Mars with movement exempt from its being. Its peculiar shape was elongated into three large protrusions that appeared to be man-sized. Each met in the middle to create an archaic symbol indiscernible by the lunatic astronomers that chanced upon its existence for a single moment, and their haggard manuscripts and scribbled drawings had divulged it to be of the English language: it was a Y.

Yet its real purpose was unknown by the humans that observed it through their telescopes, for the creatures inside were accused of treason, a transgression so inconceivable that the grand master of the universe had trapped them there for a planned eternity.

x

The goddess of Life stirred in her sleep, her ears picking up the sounds of grunting and strained groans that encapsulated the anger she knew full well belonged to her brother.

She was curled in the corner of the enormous cavern that she inured with her standard visage. It was damp and dank, fishing with the stenches of unknown putridity; it spread infinitely, sharing its unbearable smell with each of the inhabitants which crawled and slunk listlessly through their own dug corridors. Lifting her head and opening her eyes, she was brought by the vision of darkness that commonly accommodated her existence here in this prison. The only light she could see, after a few moments of rubbing her eyes, was the faint aura spread about her body.

She adopted a humanoid look like almost the rest of the deities dwelling in the pantheon. They rather liked the look and the mannerisms of the humans which laden the Earth long years ago, though some preferred their true form to the volatile appearances of the humans.

Her eyes blinked perplexedly so when she recognized the red hue of Yvetal on the edge of her vision. The light was a blur, rapidly moving from side to side, and she heard the sounds of loathing and amenity, too. His shouting had designated the vigor with which he worked whenever choler had plagued his system and sent rage piling through the ramparts od his veins. She slowly gained her footing upon the cool surface of the cave, and she drew a relaxed sigh from her lips that involuntarily escaped. The sound wasn't loud enough to rouse the god of Death from his useless thrashing, nor had it been able to penetrate the noise of rocks slamming upon the ground, the scattering pebbles sharply bouncing off the floor with velocities unbeknownst. Hesitantly, she approached with silent strides through the voluminous spreads of the cavern, her padding inaudible in the noise engendered by his spleen.

The noises became louder and nearer; her steps began slowing, gradually germinating into a mere plod lethargic in temperament. The heaving of Yvetal's chest had made him pause in the chaos he brought willingly upon the haggard wall in question; the noise so suddenly ceased, whereupon Xerneas's gasping was heard. Her attempts to prevent stepping on the rocks dispersed about the ground had gone in vain.

Hence, Yvetal whipped his head around to peer at the petite woman. Her glowing blue aura enthralled the petite, young form of a twenty-year-old woman adorning a small white dress that flowered down to below her knees. She could've easily passed for a human if it weren't for the immense horns made of ivory and multicolored jewels that emerged from her comely, flowing hair. A look of determination was evident upon her visage; commonplace it was, and condescending, especially to her brother.

His efforts of escape were suddenly forgotten as exhaustion, something many deities had never experienced before unwilling humanization was imbued inside them, spread abound his body, and he slumped into the small indentation he made in the dark, gleaming obsidian. He didn't care for the suit he wore to be dirtied and affected by the stonework that surrounded them indefinitely. He said, "What are you doing awake, Xerneas? You should be sleeping."

She shrugged. "It was difficult to sleep while you made your mark on the wall. It's even more so when the shouting reaches a threshold that makes slumber virtually impossible."

He smiled wryly. Running his hand through a thick mane of dark hair, he managed, "Too bad I got you up, then. I'm sure you had some great dreams. Cresselia always does a great number on the pleasure given by those things. Can't explain it, but boy, do they rock."

Her smile revealed no emotion to the god of Death. She simply took a seat in front of him, crossing her legs and releasing a sigh of exasperation. "Need I remind you that a thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares and a thousand sleepless nights do not equal the foundation of a pleasurable existence?"

He said nothing.

He never wants to answer my questions, she thought sadly. "Well?" she badgered.

"You have," he said begrudgingly. His voice was edged with serration and malice.

She smiled at the response, inciting the flow of inexistent blood to toil harshly to the edifices of his sculpted cheeks. "Then you should know exactly how I feel about dreams and nightmares and sleepless nights."

He grunted. "I was just joking, y'know," he said.

"Sure."

She got to her feet again, testing the sturdiness of the ground with the ball of her foot. It was still caked with sharp-edged pebbles, but those could easily be avoided if she stepped carefully through the terrain. She walked to the indentation where Yvetal rested his head in with only three scratches injuring her feet. Her hands run up and down the pockmark, feeling the divets and curvatures of the abrasion with her lithe fingers.

"Angry?" she asked absently, picking at the stray rocks and throwing them askew.

"Yes," he answered from beneath her. His aura grew in conception as his eyes glowed a dark crimson, increasing its radius to an enormous inflammation. She inched away from the abrasion, avoiding the red light as it bounded unconsciously toward her.

"What about?"

"Arceus," he replied vaguely. "And you."

She squinted at him. Sometimes she reigned him in too far, but mentioning her had set off a nerve that prevented her from engaging naturally within arguments with her brother. It was severed in a mere second, and her face garnered an embarrassing loathing that she occasionally battered Yvetal with. "You're mad about me?" she asked defensively, crossing her arms over her chest. "What have you to be mad about?"

He peered up at her with contempt, his eyes closing together, and then got to his feet, hovering above her with his utmost height. He towered over her, for they were stark juxtapositions to each other's existence. She always hated how he could look down on her and make her look small in the eyes of those who never watched, the inexistent audience that garnered their skills of dominance into honed talents. Yet she never acquiesced under his foot, keeping her confidence and arrogance as she went down in the coming years, decades, centuries and millennia she lived alongside this man of anger and vengeance.

"He always adored you, y'know," said Yvetal, the choler entering his voice.

"Yes, he did. I was the respectful one whilst you were the rebellious one. If I had my own child, I would have punished the latter without thinking anything of their motives but of their behavior in the matter."

"Arceus favored you because you had listened without questioning his motives. Never did you think I was telling the truth when I told you -"

"Never mention that awful thing to me again, will you?" she snapped. "It was hard enough being trapped here by him due to your inconsiderate snooping regarding his slumbers and your insistence to share it with me of all people."

"I thought I could get you to see my side of the story, Xerneas," he said firmly. "Yet you still hadn't believed a word I said because Arceus insisted it wasn't true, that the things I proposed with such conviction were unbelievable simply because he said so."

"Has he ever lied to us before, Yvetal?" she asked.

"Yes, he has," he exclaimed. His voice was getting strained, stretched beyond the threshold of tolerance. He had clenched his fists; his face grew in color. "You never wanted to listen to me then, and I know you will not listen to me now, I know for sure. You are a coward, Xerneas. You are submissive when you think you're confident!"

She pushed herself onto the tips of her toes, pressing her finger to his chest. Her fingernail dug into the fabric, and the agony she wished to inflict upon him was justified. "He has always given us the ability to live and not die, y'know. We are immortal, Yvetal, what else could you ask for? He only asks for us to be loyal."

"And you are not loyal to the people who trusted you the most," he said. "Do you remember Valentino and the way you just let him go? _Do you_?"

She shook her head, denial running through her veins. She did not let him go; he went on his own merits. "Valentino was dying," she choked out. "I did what I had to do, I did my job. I handed him off to you because he said he was willing to go into the afterlife if I wanted him to."

"But it was Arceus that controlled you to say yes, Xerneas. I know how much you loved that man, that mortal. You had memories that have plagued you for long intervals. I hear you say his name, Xerneas."

"Stop!" she shrieked. "YOU DON'T KNOW ME!"

"I know you better than Arceus himself. He didn't care for individuality, he only wanted us for our unquestionable loyalty, no matter if it killed millions of his own creations, no matter if it went against our own moralities, no matter if our love had brought us to exile."

She covered her ears, shouting at Yvetal to stop talking, to cease all utterances at her expense.

He did nothing of the sort. His face was red with determination as hers was previously. The irony of the situation was unspoken, but it was addressed by their own consciences, and Yvetal used this to his advantage. "Valentino was in your hands, Xerneas," he declared easily, "and you had done the same as me, except you had let him go and continued believing in Arceus's control. You never queried why he did the things he did to us, y'know. Maria Thebes was the love of my life, the one above all, and she was taken away by that vile fucking beast. How do you think I felt at that?"

She shook her head, said nothing. Stop, she thought, her voice too hoarse and drawn for any capability of speech at all. I told you to stop, you monster, yet you keep going. Why must you affect me so?

"We are vulnerable, we are almost human, but the only thing he sees us as are workers that will never go against him. A revolution never has occurred because all of them like the stupid overlord as he is. Well, guess what? I don't, Xerneas!"

"He has done nothing to you," she whispered surely. "All you speak is folly and pretense."

"What?" he demanded. "Speak up when you comment, you weak coward!"

"YOU ARE PRETENDING!" she shouted loudly, the resonance of the shriek bouncing effectively from the walls and into his conception. She yelled, "YOU ARE A LIAR!"

"Why would I lie about all of this, Xerneas? Why would I lie about my failed love with a mortal I met on Earth? Why would I lie about Arceus and his idiotic ways of ruling this universe in its enormity?"

"I don't know," she whispered, repeating it over and over as she curled into a ball, crushing her guilt into the depths of her bile and dissolving it into inexistence. The defeat in her tonality disappeared, replaced with a meager erroneous ogle at the towering man of rage and choler and spleen and unwilling, blatant, uncoated _truth_.

The heaving of his chest had evolved into a rasping gasp that escaped his mouth in unwilling intervals.

"You hate me, and I hate you, but I still care, y'know," he said gruffly. "I don't want you to be affected by the utter folly that Arceus feeds you. D'you know what I mean? Xerneas?"

Her voice was small and degraded into a mere whisper that was almost inaudible, yet he heard it nonetheless. "Piss off," she exclaimed angrily. "Valentino loved me and he wanted to go, Yvetal. Arceus said that was what he wanted, and never has Arceus has lied to any of us - even you."

He grimaced at the lying woman. He watched the tears roll down her cheeks, increased by the mere inclusion of growing blue that tinged her cheeks. "He has lied to all of us, Xerneas - the moment you realize that, the more you'll see the world in a better light. The sciences we brought to the humans was not a deterrent of evolution, but a tool to assist them as they go about their lives without struggle. Arceus has lied about this, and I saw through his mask."

"He has not lied about that," she insisted. But she knew that the technologies developed by the humans would soon transcend their assistance, bringing aside the churches of Arceus and pushing them into a utopia crafted by their own hands, by the sciences introduced by their own divine intervention. "He has only our own existences in mind. The worshipping, the lauding - it will go away when they evolve a little too much."

"Yet it would not matter," he said sternly. "We would dissipate no matter the circumstances. The sentience on Earth are not the only ones which live in this solar system, huh?"

He cannot know about Erdenwald, she thought. Could he have gotten that information? But from who would he have received such confidential knowledge?

Instead of asking the internal questions which plagued her, she asked anxiously, "What do you mean?"

But he said nothing in return and kept silent as he skulked away. The only thing that she saw of him was his red eyes as he turned momentarily to her, sneering.


	2. i

The oxygen mask covering his face was flimsy and looked unreliable, as was the nanosuit binding his radiation-protected skin, but it held as he punched the airlock hatch open. Making sure that the tether connecting him from the wench on the opposite side of the airlock was tight and unmoving, he watched with intent eyes as the hatch slowly opened, the mechanisms turning and winding against each other. The two white halves of the airlock's output opened to reveal the great vacuum of space behind his visage, the unblinking stars and floating asteroids filling the devoid volume of its enormity. The planets between the dumbbell-shaped spacecraft were glowing a soft red, tinting his peripheral with an odd substance which reminded him of his grandmother's homemade raspberry jelly.

His earpiece shrieked with a sudden noise, and he spread his gloved fingers to touch the sides of his head, where he could feel the agony thundering through his mind. He staggered and bumped into the side of the airlock as it started to affect his inadvertent yet uncontrollable physical activity.

Disoriented, he leaned uneasily against the wall, heaving great breaths and fogging up his facemask. The sudden feedback faded in time, but the ringing did not dissipate as the voice of the communications expert flitted from his ears. "Sorry 'bout that," Garnett apologized.

"Sure," slurred Zanz, groaning a lot as he pushed himself from the wall. "Why didn't we get a goddamn Pokémon to leap through this stupid void to check that thing out?"

"We don't have specialized nanosuits for them, y'know."

Zanz scoffed. "Whatever," he murmured.

The whole space was still in front of him, though, and he looked into its vast emptiness, scowling at it all. In it, there was a strange light emitting from a enlarged rock protruding with queer crystals that looked the size of him. That's what I have to look at, he thought. Righting himself, he made sure he didn't have any tears or rips in the nanosuit, as that would've been a very expensive compensation he knew he was capable of paying. He didn't spend too long entertaining that thought, though, so he leapt from the airlock and drifted through the infinite, gravity-free space amid him.

He experimentally tugged on the tether. Secure, he thought. Good, I'd rather not fly into this void of space.

"What even is it?" he asked absently Garnett. "I think it's some stupid rock, but the crew clearly has other thoughts that I personally don't care for, as they're all otherworldly and revolve around the existence of another species other than Pokémon and humans altogether."

When he got no response, he scoffed, flicking his tongue to manually deactivate the earpiece and its radio. He didn't care if the expert tried contacting him again; he'd have to deal with the consequences of inaction, really.

He treaded on no ground at all with his feet and hands, touching nothing but empty, oxygen-less air, but he was assisted in his movements forward by the means of a small propulsion system at his hips, fully built into the nanosuit as a regular precaution for human ventures outside the spacecraft. It propelled him onward for as long as he wished, but its deactivation was, in his honest opinion, a pain in the ass to fully operate, so he knew that it'd have to be dealt with accordingly.

The rock was still a few hundred meters away from him, so he opted to float in relative silence, listening to the sound of his sped-up breathing as he continued forward.

Occasionally, he'd hum a tune or something that didn't bore through his mind like a college history lesson, and in time, he finally arrived at the strange rock floating absently, idly in space without interruption, resting there like the impeding Sun at the edge of his peripheral.

It rotated and orbited nothing in particular, but its rooted position never altered, never changed. Staying in that one place, its wild spinning looked strange and actively unsettling, although it truly was an anomaly that was . . . innocuous.

In a panic, as he approached fast, Zanz jammed the complex deactivation of the propulsion systems right before his abdomen made contact with one of the sharp protrusions of inordinate origin. He backed away, pulling tight on the cord that bond him to the spacecraft behind him. It took him a few moments to recover from such a sudden gesticulation, but when he did get himself and his conscience together, he looked straight at the rock and its queerness. Inquiry was obviously bubbling on the edge of his split tongue, but he needn't speak in the awe aghast he experience amid its presence.

His first compiled thought was that he didn't expect it to be so . . . big. The approximations of its size were nothing considering the physical dimensions presented in front of him, staring at him sternly. Humongous and otherworldly, with its indented craters acting as eyes and the creases and cuts caused by the brushing and collision of other drifting asteroids and space junk serving as mouths, it looked like a strange deity that pierced itself with crystals of colorations he . . . truly could not fathom attempting to describe. He was sure that it was glowing a teal or blue-green when he was so far away, yet staring at it with the only border keeping them apart being his facemask, it was indistinguishable.

What the hell even is this? he thought dreadfully, a tentative, apprehensive shred trailing through his body. It doesn't look normal. I doubt it is. . . .

He flicked on the radio, flapping his tongue uselessly until he finally tapped the miniscule button with its tip. The warped sounds of space were inconsequential in the midst of the crackling of the frequencies, stable and evident, so he unconfidently spoke into the static. "Hey, I'm at the asteroid," he announced, positioning himself upright. "I'm going to analyze it with my portable scanners, if that's all right."

The expert's voice pierced the static, responding almost immediately. "Yes, that's all right. Make sure you get the entire thing, Zanz."

"Acknowledged."

From his protective wristbands, eight small spheres emerged from their melded threshold. Miniature cameras located on their fronts realistically blinked like human eyes, and Zanz whispered a declarative command. They rigidly shook in affirmation, their beady lens staring at the asteroid, and positioned themselves in a cube that enclosed the asteroid.

As their invisible lasers flashed amongst its spinning composition, he noticed that the hypnotism was broken. As to why it was so, he could only blame the operable spheres and their respective positions revealing the reality of the asteroid's spinning and gyrating. He looked down at his wrist, the display screen glowing. The lasers rose slowly but resolutely, and in time, as he remained there hanging in space, humming a toneless tune, it turned out that the scanners conveyed the asteroid's composition to be manifested by bunches of accumulated iron, flakes of nickel. Smelting ores, of course, he thought. There is nearly nothing in this stupid void of voluminous space that was profitable.

That's actually the reason why so many people came into these uncharted seas of dying, combusted stars and distant planets, he concluded. The International Program of Interstellar Study gave way to the astrosciences he and his colleagues rigorously took part in gave way to the other developments now located in the waters of black oblivion. Orbiting the Earth were satellites with solar panels connected to their immense surface area, supplying the lands down below with electricity capable of operating systems that would overload a predominant method of watt generation, that of which preceded the electric Pokémon whose wattage capped high enough to burst a standard lightbulb and forty-nine more like it. And even farther than that were the rock miners that expended their labor on the retrieval of ores from the Asteroid Belt, smelting them down, broadcasting their expensive finds to the their home world in exchange for a "sick amount of dough," as one of their wild kind would perhaps comment.

He was a simple botanist, though, planting seeds in the coop of his small living quarters, studying the unusual aspects of his field with passion he felt from a young age, fueling the oxygen tanks in his room with its inherent production. His fascination never dissipated through the years, but it weakened significantly due to the exposure to the more complex sciences of his colleagues, especially when they criticized his line of duty and study. Although he wasn't the most dignified scientist in the diverse institution of the IPIS, serving as another lowly commoner amongst the higher-class nobleman, he volunteered to go out here.

As for his reasoning, he virtually had none besides one thing: A discovery of his own that presented singular plant-life. Gardens were more his forte, of course, his repertoire consisting of green plants and their inherent coloration, but he wanted to go to space. There were more out there, he knew, for two years prior, he was studying few specimens brought back down from distant planets.

From a confidential supplier, he extracted a few experimental samples of a rare yet strange, soot-gray semblance of plant-life. Its origin diverted straight from the smoldering, barren, skin-boiling surface of Mercury, its closeness to the Sun baking it alive like a turkey in November. Upon initial examination, the procedural scanners revealed the molecular structure and atomic components of the thing were uncanny. The light grey regolith it was buried in came along with the plant, thankfully to preserve the inanimate life, and he learned that instead of extracting carbon monoxide from the air, for there was nothing to generate oxygen nor anything to exhale the much-needed compound, it used the element filaments in the "soil" to further its process of photosynthesis. Thus, its coloration was a combination of the metallic elements found beneath the burning surface of the planet, protecting its fragile, delicate leaves from withering away in the brightness of the Sun, as well as preventing the darkened chlorophyll from overheating and boiling into oblivion.

If he could replicate the same discovery of a plant on another planet by himself, then he'd be happy enough. The vegan diet he adopted so long ago would be expanded upon by the inevitable discovery of the edible vegetables and fruits. His mouth savored at the thought of it.

Travelling amongst the unblinking stars to perhaps locate something inhabitable by humans and Pokémon, wherein life could prosper without the assistance of oxygen masks and nanosuits and precautions for all sorts of radiation that might sear the skin and wear away at the meek bones of individuals was a great proposition, wasn't bad, especially if his own life would be bettered by the act of moving through their expanses at the speed of standard spacecrafts, or even faster, albeit just at a smidgen higher acceleration rate, if he were to adopt the presence of a derelict, decrepit shuttles located in the storage hold of the _Satoshi_.

But in the presence of an atheist electrotechnician/captain propagating that science was the future at nigh all tines, an ambitious yet pompous astrobiologist seeking out intelligent life on other planets, a young, pretty woman whose IQ was flaunted around obnoxiously whilst she dabbled experimentally on her computing tablet, and a silent man whose eternal gaze never broke from his orderly sets of chemicals and flasks, he felt . . . insignificant. With these hyper-intelligent scientists working on fields he practically knew nothing about, his life on the _Satoshi_ was less than enjoyable, less than what he wished.

The beeping of his earpiece brought him from his reverie, his world of thought awakening to the endless sight of space, obfuscated by the asteroid that stagnated right in front of him.

Addled by his own notions of botany, he readjusted his position amongst the easily-traversed space. The eight spheres finally finished their scanning, returning to their systematic occupations, and as they settled, he watched as his wrist displays read the same things he'd seen before, running down the list with small decimal points preceding immaculate percentages.

But there was one element unbeknownst to Finn, the AI assisting the ship in its operations, and he gazed curiously at the abundance of the unknown element, clocking at near sixty-four percent of the enormity of the queer thing.

He knew almost next to nothing of chemistry, but if there wasn't anything that Finn could derive from the present sample, whether it be an element, compound or some sort of concoction craftd by the menial demonstrations of nature at its acute finest, and other than that it emanated a smidgen of atomic radiation blazing at the edges of his nanosuit which threatened to pierce its fabric resolutely, then the fact that it was beyond their innate control was a warning sign they could back the operation up.

I know better than that, he thought, tapping a few buttons on the touch-sensitive wrist display. Then, flicking his radio on again: "I completed scanning. Sending its documentation to you now."

Margaret's voice entered his ear, abrasively clanging against the sides of his head. Gods, that stupid voice is annoying, he thought. "Hey, Zanzie," she said, a Southern lilt edging her intonation.

Annoyed, he said, "Could you get someone else on the line, please?"

"No can do," she responded.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Well, if you must be so obtrusive, Mary, I'm unsure about how this large rock here has received this immense amount of radiation, and this element, too."

"I am, too," she said complacently.

"Our plans were to examine it and find out what it is. It seems otherworldly, though. And right now, I can't even perceive the stupid color of the damn thing."

A moment of silence passed. Zanz enjoyed the stillness of space now, encompassing the isolation he portrayed easily in the wake of the intelligent scientists roaming the _Satoshi_ with their work hanging from the frays of their fingers.

"It looks green or blue to me," she proclaimed reasonably.

"Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Until I came quite closer, it looked teal, but then it just . . . turned into a mystery. I can't even begin to describe it."

"That's not very clinical of you, Zanzie," she mentioned sardonically, criticizing his articulation.

Her satirical commentary flitted through his mind as he floated closer to the asteroid. The resonant ridges and creases upon the rock looked out to him now, yet he ignored the gazes of the craters as it wound around, spinning on a dimensionless as though it were being tossed through a washing machine working at high maintenance. If he were so mesmerized earlier, he wouldn't've noticed anything about it, and would've reported that noteworthy details of the asteroid were quite devoid.

But as he looked at it sideways, tilting his gaze to his left, it looked, ever so slightly, that the scintillating, iridescent rock appeared to be in the strange shape of a malformed Y. Two large spires made of the unnamable coloration (which still frustrated Zanz beyond belief, its incomprehensible disposition smacking against the side of his head) spread outward from the central, iron-condensed body spanning the length of his height downward, dipping into a flap that was tipped with three crystals, glowing inconceivably.

"Yvetal," whispered Zanz. He inched closer to the asteroid, careful not to place the nanosuit against the unknown element bestrewn amid the uneven, unstable rock. His fingers stretched so daringly close to the spires, but he did not touch them, lest he succumb to the infectious disease of malevolent curiosity.

"What?" asked Margaret, stripping him of his daring touch.

"Who," he corrected. "In the Book of Arceus, there is a god of Death, and his name is Yvetal."

"So? What does that have to do with this?"

"I know you're a godless woman, Mary, but hear me out," he insisted. She grunted in response, so he continued, "Arceus helped in the creation of multiple gods that controlled some aspects of the Universe, and in a legend of old, there was speak of two gods: Xerneas and Yvetal, respectively controlling the aspects of Life and Death. The legend followed a virtually sinless man who was afflicted with a fatal disease destined to kill him, and Xerneas, in his ill, spake unto him words of encouragement and passion as he dragged closer to the control and endowment of Yvetal. The blue-hued spirit that walked at his side through his ventures before death disappeared one day without trace of dissipation. Yvetal appeared in the sky as a red-hued demon, spreading his body in the form of a strewn Y. Then he collapsed as Yvetal spoke to him, whispering in his ear the language of Death."

"And?" She sounded impatient.

"Presumably, if we're following this legend, the Y means something." To elaborate, he added, "It looks like a Y, but has the veil of blue to guard it from its true demeanor."

"Touch it," she said suddenly.

Sharping inhaling a breath of oxygen that pipes down his lung and nearly choked him, his incredulous reply, impactful in the extremities of the situation, was a loudly shrieked "What?" which rang against the protective facemask.

"I assume you're telling me that this thing has a spiritual disposition about it. Touch it," Margaret repeated, chuckling. "Science dictates that nothing'll happen, right?"

Zanz sneered. If she could see him, he'd give her a grotesque grimace, but he could do no such thing at the moment, much to his displeasure. "It's not my faith," he answered defensively.

"And I don't like to brag about all my accomplishments," she retorted. Then, in an easier voice: "Just do it, Zanzie. I'd like to see what happens."


	3. ii

Finally, Zanz entered the _Satoshi_ again. The open airlock exposed him to the very fact that it hadn't been manually shut by another individual supposedly keeping him company in the possibility that an accident could occur. This meant that he would be drifting in space for the remainder of his oxygen tank if something of that magnitude happened. He shivered at the thought as he set his feet upon the surface of the airlock.

Once he was out of the airlock and inside the safe, clean atmosphere of the _Satoshi_ 's insulated interior, he took off the oxygen mask and stripped himself of his nanosuit, slinging the equipment over his forearm. He wandered aimlessly through the corridors that led through the the spacecraft, and where he found the place which had supplied him of his equipment, he replaced them to their origin, hanging them forlornly as his insides churned with anxiety. His earpiece still remained silent since he turned it off, and he didn't plan on readjusting its settings with the tip of his tongue anymore.

He kept his head directed forward, striding down the hallway where he met the pitch-black entrance to the cargo hold. This side of the spacecraft, the one half of the dumb-bell perfectly representing the _Satoshi_ in its enormity, contained two central things: the cargo, of course, and the Pokémon. The latter, whose containment was restricted to a singular cage with automatically dispensed food and water, howled and barked and shrieked and called out their names in the darkness that they succumb to every night, every day, only penetrated by the small caution lights that blinked every so often so one didn't get too lost in the labyrinthine corridors of steel cages. Now it held him as he started through the darkened hallways, tossing caution into the wind.

He carried a flashlight which he shone this way and that, illuminating the grotesque scenery wherein the Pokémon lived off needs and necessities instead of desires of selfish wants. There were those wrought with starvation that refused to ingest the disgusting pellets of food that filled their bowls. Dehydration was more commonplace than the famine, though, as the water hadn't been purified for the Pokémon like it had been for the humans, engendering their weariness to ingest it and risk contracting disease or illness. And the gashes and abrasions apparent upon their bodies were accurately self-inflicted; some even bashed their head against the cage door so much that their skull collapsed upon itself, crushing their brains as they slumped onto the ground.

But he paid them no heed. He pressed through into the connecting beam that held both the sides of the spacecraft. The glassteel that supported his weight gave him a look into the eternal visage of the stars and distant planets and even more distant galaxies, yet he looked nowhere but straight as he pushed his small flashlight back into his pocket, the lights above him shining so much that its existence here was utter unnecessary.

The inhabitants of those quarters weren't, at the moment, occupying their places of living, of course. He knew that they were congregating within the shuttle's main lobby, on the opposite side of the spacecraft where the large airlock was located, speaking of the asteroid he examined and connected with an intoxicating anxiety consciously aided by Margaret's own blinding curiosity. He need not speak of the occurrences that happened in the wake of his actions.

He imagined their conversions were wrought with animate mouths restricting their speech to a select few conspiracies roiling amongst their minds. Captain Lemon must've been listing off the all scientific possibilities for its inexorably strange development, he realized. The thought gave him the smidgen of a chance to smile, given how absolutely unfortunate the crew members and their respective Pokémon companions were to listen to the young man's wild ramblings.

Margaret emerged from the other side of the corridor, presumably originating from the shrewd communications room tasseled with fairly reliable technology. Her short hair, a wild amalgamation of color ranging from the ultraviolet spectrum, was wrung into a sharp ponytail. The strands of colorful fringe that fell in small leave-like flaps from the bottom of the hair-tie flopped up and down as she hastily bound down the hallway, her boots clanging uneasily upon the metallic floor underfoot. She was dressed so easily in a dark no-sleeve and shorts that he could no less derive that she came a spacecraft's crew than a beach on the edges of Kalos.

And, as she came closer and closer, her face glowing a mad crimson, he knew he could not see her bright brown eyes beyond the darkened sunglasses she commonplace adorned indoors, but he could tell, from mere knowledge of the foreigner who'd annoyed him for years in the IPIS's main headquarters down in Unova, that they were flickering vivaciously with a mischievous flame about them, aided by the innately enthusiastic bounce in her step.

Margaret skidded to an abrupt halt right in front of him, nigh slipping in the provocatively cleansed floors of the _Satoshi_. Laughing in her own klutziness, she brought up her sunglasses to the utmost peak of her nose. "Heya, Zanzie," she said. "Did you touch it? D'ya feel like you're enlightened a bit? Finally found the ways of religion and converted into a devout Believer?"

He ignored her, answering only with a small grunt. Continuing forward, he knocked into her shoulder inadvertently, but he didn't mind the abrasive interaction, as it pushed her aside and allowed him access to his own quarters.

She frowned. "C'mon, you big lug, you had to have touched it."

"I don't want to talk about it," he said glumly, gesturing offhandedly at her insistence. "Please leave me alone."

"Dude, seriously?" she asked incredulously.

"Yes, seriously. It wasn't too good out there, and I don't feel too well, to be honest," he answered.

"Well, yeah, it's space. It's supposed to make you feel uneasy. There's an infinite amount of void all around us, enclosing on us with an inexorable defiance that stretches past the thoughts regularly fathomable. If you expected anything less than that, I'm sorely disappointed in you, Zanzie. You look to be a sophisticated man, with all your botany skills and whatnot, but you're scared like the lot of us, aren'tcha?"

He eyed her curiously, wondering whether or not she was entirely truthful with her remarks of his career as a botanist. She never really complimented him before, and even if she did, it was usually in the form of an inconceivable insult, but this time, she smiled honestly. She didn't seem to shroud herself with a façade of erroneousness like usual. So engrossed in her work, it was hard to see that she showed any semblance of emotion besides irritation and frustration towards any unreliable machinery located on the ship, omitting her supposedly hilarious interactions with Zanz himself, so he supposed that this was a spark of a closer bond.

That was unacceptable, he thought.

He said, "Yes, Mary, I am."

"Don't worry, Zanzie, we're all scared." She rested a hand on his shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. "Well, maybe not Captain Lemon, who seems absolutely willing to be going down with the _Satoshi_ , but almost all of us have been affright about our existence and its nigh expiration date out here in this infinite oblivion. Don't give up hope," she finished.

He smiled grimly. "I won't. Now that I know that, if you'll excuse me, I want to return to my quarters and take a nap before my work is required."

"Okay, okay," she replied, holding up her hands. She turned on her heel, ready to leave. Then, looking back with a devilish smile: "I'll see you later, then?"

He curtly nodded. She still smiled at him as she disappeared from his view, heading back down the way she came. He followed her figure as she walked, her hips swaying in the wake of her conversation. His mind addled with both the thought of her and the queer asteroid he interacted with hitherto entrance upon the _Satoshi_ , he was distracted until he found his quarters.

It was small: its contents consisted of a mere single bunk and a pullout desk. It was cozy, comfortable. He adored it so. He felt snug and warm within its confines, keeping him away from the individuals outside of his space by means of the locked door. The red-clay walls that led up to the steel-framed dome of glassteel that acted as the ceiling curled inward, exposing the star-punctured darkness that persisted endlessly to his unprotected eyes. And he loved looking up at the stars, gazing at their mesmerizing conception, crafting billions of shining, glowing works of art through the mindless connection.

But as he entered his quarters and breathed in the fresh oxygen, he noticed that he was looking into a familiar shade of blue at the drooping plants that bestrewn upon his desk, hiding underneath the designations plastered upon their pots like he'd done back in Unova.

The ethereal woman standing in front him turned, her lips quirking upward in a pleasant smile that bespoke no volatile origination. "You should've been nicer, Christopher," she exclaimed sweetly, eyeing him carefully with her luminescent icy-blue irises. Her flowing, ghostly hair floated behind her as though she were hanging in zero gravity. Two elegant horns emerged from the crown of her head, their stumps of origin hidden by the iridescent fringe. Decorated with jewels and crystals of all different colors, she shone bright in his sensitive eyes. She was a specter that wore nothing more than a transparent cloth which covered the crux of her voluptuous anatomy, but to him, she was all but a surreal dream brought to pseudo-corporeality.

His mouth was agape. No, no, no, no, no, this is not happening, he thought. It's not okay, this is not real, she is not real. Gods, this isn't true.

The blue apparition blocked his view of his great work and its establishments in botany as a whole, but her back was to him, as she then turned around began touching anything that seemed to be green with a languid grace he expected of a god. The objects didn't fall between her thin fingers as she examined them like he thought, and her aura, a light-blue emanating from all around her spreading out a few decimeters in every direction, innocuously assisted the plants in their illness. Every plant's stalk awakened to its fullest height, drawing nearer to the distant stars that sparked with eternal light overhead.

And she turned to him with a smile, holding out a potted plant from the surface of Mars, rust-red in its mushroom-shaped leaves and its stalk a humble, incurable crimson. So unusually was it standing upright, for it, in hitherto experiences throughout the star trek, drooped down considerably in the heavy Earth-standard gravity.

Zanz, devastated at the disrupted nature of his plant-life, swiped the plant from betwixt her fingers, ripping it away and keeping it close to his chest. "What're you even doing with my plants?" he gasped outrageously. He stroked the stimulated leaves with a graceful touch, cooing upon their apparent destruction. "They're ruined!"

Her smile slowly washed off her face. Her inherent happiness seemed to be ripped from her like his plants, and her destroyed expression vindictively turned to him in an emblazoned solemn. "They are not ruined," she said defensively, picking at the edges of her dress. "They have been rejuvenated to their fullest life. You should be happy."

He snorted, walking forward to pass the ethereal woman. It had surprised him that he passed right through her as though she were simply a holographic definition, and the unnerving condition which surged through him was unbelievably egregious, as a shrill shock pierced through his spine and travelled inconspicuously to the bridge of his neck.

He staggered forward in agony, waving his arms all around, and he tried to veer away from his work. The work he'd spent so many patient hours poring over whilst he listened to the literary arts of Shakespeare and Poe via audiobook. He pinched his tweezers as he recited the mere poems of abhorrence drafted and published by the latter, exaggerating the articulation of the former's inured vocabulary while he documented the Martian plant and its altercations with standard bacteria from Earth. And his discourse from his stumbling engendered the collapse on his desk as he accidentally slammed the side of his head against it. It folded inward, throwing itself from the hinges that kept it and his plants upright, and Zanz crashed to the floor alongside his godforsaken work, the pots holding the plants smashing into shreds and shards sharp to the touch.

"Yvetal is coming for me," he murmured.

His right eye glowed with the aura of Xerneas's bodily figure. "I hope he doesn't," she said, her voice a flowing river as the words toppled from her lips. "Truly, he does not belong here on this ship. Not yet, anyways."

He opened a single eye, looking into the beautiful face of disconcerted emotions roiling round her features. She glows so brightly, he thought. "So he is real," he said. "The legends of Arecus - they're real. No, this can't be. No, science dictates all, doesn't it?"

Xerneas shook her head, adorning a somber expression. "Afraid not, son. Science dictates few. If the gods weren't here and weren't living and breathing, I wouldn't be sitting here right now with you." She sighed, pushing her hair from her face as it floated innocuously yet annoyingly close to her glowing eyes. Then, somberly: "You perhaps wouldn't have destroyed all your plants."

His other eye opened, and both were widened. He scrambled to his feet, ready to get his plants all together so all of his work hadn't been in vain. But he scraped his palms against the shards of clay scattered about the floor. He clutched his hand close to his chest in pain as he felt his skin open, his flesh exposed, blood trickling a few streaks of red down to his wrist.

"Ah! Are you okay?" exclaimed Xerneas.

"I cut myself, whaddaya think?" he snapped.

She gave him a worried look. Quickly, she hobbled over to him without any sort of audible footsteps ringing through the small confines of his quarters. He had pressed his back against the wall, breathing heavily as he suffered through his injury. She knelt beside him as he nigh tried to stagger up and rifle through the medical kit underneath his bunk. She reached forward and grabbed his forearm with difficulty, as his squirming was jacked to an all-time high once he felt the pure coolness of her lithe fingers. He could not push the thought from his mind that he was feeling an ice-cube running up the length of his palm, but once his skin closed up and a small pink line took its place, he nearly shrieked, shrinking against the wall again.

The door clicked as the doorknob was suddenly thrown open. The blinding luminance pouring in from the doorway shone on the devastation that was bestrewn about the floor, dispersed with regolith, soil, shards of clay, the multi-colored leaves and stalks of his botany. All of it was congregated into the shattered dreams of years of study, and as the light shone in a square that bordered Zanz's lithe, disparaged form lying against the wall, it was Lemon who broke the spell that mesmerized him into torpor, blocking the iridescence blinding him into submission.

"Sir," he greeted the captain.

Captain Lemon was a rugged man in his early thirties that commonplace towered over many of the inhabitants of the _Satoshi_ , perhaps due to his reluctance to return to regular gravity after being exposed to its absence whilst he lived exclusively in the ISS for three years. Long hair winding down his from his scalp to his shoulders, the strands stopped uneasily at his chiseled, handsome chin, haggard with varied amounts of blonde stubble reaching to places he could not see. He was adorned with the standard wear of a well-travelled astronaut, dressing in grey coveralls that creased all of his skin in risk of being exposed, and he rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, stepping forward to meet the unnecessarily injured man resting against the wall.

He nigh knocked into Xerneas as though he couldn't see the visible aura she exuded, or the figure she herself was presently displaying. She quickly backed away as soon as he came close, lifting herself easily upon the surface of his bunk. Her existence was ghost-like, so she made no indentation in the mattress. Lying on the bunk, she was virtually inexistent, and Zanz couldn't feel less vulnerable underneath the penetrative gaze of the _Satoshi_ 's captain.

Lemon brushed away the precarious shards of pottery lining the floor away with the tip of his shoes. He knelt to his knee, giving Zanz a worried smile. "You all right, Zanz?" he asked.

"I'm sure I'm all right," Zanz answered, anxiously hiding away his palm from view. "Just a little cut, is all. I'll get this cleaned up before the morning comes, sir."

"I just wanted to make sure that you didn't break any bones, Zanz," admitted Lemon, pushing his glasses back into position. "Insurance in space causes a lot of hassle down on Earth, and we're already past Mars and nearing Jupiter all ready. It'd be a massive setback if we returned to Earth just for you, y'know?"

Can always depend on Lemon to be as blatant as possible, Zanz thought with an inward smile. He never does try to embellish anything. That's probably why everyone always tells him he's way too harsh whenever he's trying to tell the truth.

"Yessir, I know," he replied.

Lemon nodded. He lifted himself to his feet, sighed. "Are you sure you're fine?" he inquired. "Can I leave you be?"

"Yessir," he said quickly.

Lemon left. Zanz noticed that his expression was still worrisome once he disappeared behind the doorway.

He turned to Xerneas. "Leave."

"I can't," she admitted, frowning.

He said nothing in response.

Apparently, the god of Life wasn't as ebullient as he might've suspected. A halcyon deity she was years ago, it seemed, but not any longer. The way a somber expression dominated her features for long periods of time demonstrated to Zanz that she wasn't too enthused by the fact he, of all people, brought her into existence by hands shrouded by protective fibers that prevented him from radiation poisoning. If she were to emanate something other than depression and melancholy whilst she was amongst his presence, he'd truly be surprised at this revelation, but the obscene epiphany probably would not come into fruition, so thus fruitless thoughts were irrelevant in such times.

He was proven wrong the moment he thought that. The smile she offered him as she straightened herself on his bunk, readjusting her position to something more comfortable than what she was hitherto experiencing, was enigmatic in and of itself. It unnerved him, he noticed. The gooseflesh travelling up his arms and legs were engendering him to shiver underneath her glowing gaze, and the accompanying smile did nothing to aid in his comfort, furthering his weariness to an utterly higher degree.

He looked away soon enough, and gazed down at his palm, his skin ripped away and healed within the span of mere seconds. It was a miracle, he thought. The way the plants were revived to a complete peak in operation, the methods wherein he was healed through means unbeknownst to him - all of it was on another level of supernatural. . . . Then he thought, No, it's not supernatural. It's more along the lines of spiritual, seeing as she's a possible deity manifested from faith more than a creature of unknown proportions and abilities. His brain swelled with the processing of this perplexing intellect, and he shuddered on the wall as he clenched his fingers betwixt his strands of black hair, groaning.

In the stillness, Xerneas had waited patiently. And seeing that a response did not seem applicable on the verge of his chapped lips, she decidedly continued, "You interacted with the Stone of Enigmas. It's laid in space for millennia since its initial creation, ready for someone to find it. And the man who dares to touch it reveals the existence of both my brother and I."

"And my crew found it, thought it weird, and I touched it. So, in turn, I summoned you," he replied forlornly.

"I'd classify it as more of a subconscious connection between you and I," she said lightly. When he looked at her sideways, his eyes narrowing, she added, "I basically exist only in your mind. You can hear me and I can talk to you, but no one else can actually interact with me, no matter the attempts to travel amid your synapses and stimulate your subconscious with another computing system."

"That's still rather conspicuous," he said.

"Well, you are a scientist, and I am sure that I cannot sedate your desire for answers or your constant need for inquiry by telling to simply believe. There are heathens upon this ship that have no faith in gods or deities that travel amid the stars. As you are, I think I'll be safe to say that you think you're insane, and mayhaps are unable to be convinced otherwise."

"Well," he said, lifting himself from the ground, staggering two steps to the bunk, "I'd say that because of the fact you healed me of an injury that hurt like hell in a matter of seconds, I'm either going mad or you're who you say you are."

"It's the latter, definitely," she said, a smidgen of dejection injected within her intonation.

There goes the melancholy again, thought Zanz. "Is that a problem?"

"Oh yeah. I mean, ask yourself that when Arceus locks you in a stupid rock for thousands of years, and while you're at it, why don't you tell me whether or not you think that someone who didn't believe in anything of your kind existed in the universe due to exposure to the sciences is good for your self-esteem."

And I've struck a goddamn nerve, he thought. "Sorry," he said, pushing her aside so he could lie beside her. "But . . . why did Arceus contain you?"

"He didn't want us informing you humans of anything that we gods knew."

"And that was?"

She turned to him. Her glowing face was only centimeters away from him. The coolness with which her body predominantly exuded without efflorescence was felt on his now rosy cheeks. And she smiled wryly. "It's simple - life."


	4. iii

Zanz's days on the _Satoshi_ always ran in a similar routine that rarely diverged from the considerably beaten path. It was monotonous to the point that he didn't even recognize the sensation of awakening or sleeping, thinking them to be one in the same.

But now that Xerneas constantly followed him around at every turn, it was hard to concentrate, yet easy to derive from routine. The way she marveled at the world of science that prospered throughout the enormity of the _Satoshi_ was exhilarating and hilarious, to say the least. He had to hide his explicable laughter from view whenever she asked an inane question about how the intercoms and radios worked.

He walked the corridors with her floating at his side, carefully avoiding one of the five or six individuals roaming the halls in the case that an electric shock may pass through them and stun them momentarily. The talking from the side of his mouth was slowly getting obnoxious, and the constant suspicion from his crewmates, especially from Margaret, added up in his conscience, but Xerneas reassured him that this wasn't too bad.

Yet she still never revealed to him the secret she kept for millennia. Too long, she insisted, had she kept to herself and her brother that it virtually was something irremovable from her conscience. It never left her lips during the days wherein she roamed the lands of Allearth Forest, always kept dear to her heart, yet Arceus got selfish and vindictive, fearing a revolt on the side of his own creations.

"He never liked any of us to begin with," she had told him in his quarters hitherto his eventual embracing of her constant, irrevocable presence. She sat on his bed as he roamed the quarters in a few measured paces to retrieve and deposit resources, his movements quick, his work meticulous. He always held a mask of impasse while he was functioning with his plants, but he never failed to listen in on the monologues she spout whenever she thought he wasn't paying any sort of attention to her or her beautiful manifestation. "Always, he'd blame us for the causes of famine or disease that reigned the worlds he created. Earth he loved the most, though, and he held it to his face with scrutiny, trying to find whether or not it was he who materialized the differing sciences that raked through its lands. Soon, he regarded us as those who had given our secrets over to the humans, engendering their aging procedures into better living, and one by one, he punished us. Some got treatment corresponding to their respective ideals and morality, such as Dialga being unable to warp through time on his own whim, and some suffered through worse atrocities unspeakable by my own tongue."

The secrets of science were given away by an unknown cause, though. This universal mystery plagued the pantheon, which was in discourse due to Arceus's insistence of their treason, and soon, it wasn't regarded as a pandemic awaiting treatment, but an inexorable truth that could not be given altering beliefs. The humans of the Earth began working on their own gods made of machinery and technology, and they didn't need Arceus or the others.

"His distrust went too far," she continued wistfully. "He started thinking on the ends of madness, throwing him into the void which enthralled those humans who observed, at least in one lifetime, our true forms. His secrets were being piled forth from his mouth in his sleep, when his shoutings of betrayal ceased and his shakings had stopped completely, and it was Yvetal, the bastard, that overheard something spoken by our Lord. Overwhelmed by the severity of the information, he came to me in my sleep and awakened me in an instant. Then the information was transferred to my own knowledge, and I could not believe that he would be so inane as to enlighten me with these insane epiphanies. His devilish smile never left his lips as he warped from my living quarters and mischievously babbled his findings to the others so infuriated with the actions of the Lord himself.

"Sure enough, the punishment for Yvetal's imprisonment was not his alone. He had blabbered off to the Lord that he was not alone in the sharing of the old man's secret, and when the Lord's voice boomed so loudly that I could hear it from my shelter in the Allearth Forest, I knew that his lying ways had bypassed his thought of consequence. I was taken away from my land almost immediately by Arceus himself, and soon, he had tossed us into our little, Y-shaped prison (it was made for only Yvetal, so I guess its exterior wasn't changed a bit to accommodate both he and I) and threw us into the sky with the thought that no one would ever find us again."

"He underestimated us, then," replied Zanz.

Xerneas shrugged. "Yes, he did, but it is now so dangerous for me to even say a word about the secret in fear that Arceus will return to fetch my soul and perhaps feed it to his three children down near Sinnoh. He could control his very spacecraft, stopping it and nearly everyone within it just so he could get me back in that stupid asteroid. He could flip the universe on its head just to retrieve me."

"So I'm assuming that he has control over everything in the universe," he exclaimed, lifting the repaired pot to his face to examine for any cracks that could spill with regolith or soil.

"He shared some of his power with the gods he created by his own blood, but he still has some endowment of his own, yes."

No visible cracks, he thought as he set the pot down onto the desk. Turning to the Tupperware which held a rejuvenated Martain plant, he picked it up and deposited a little of its crimson-colored soil into the pot. Once he poured the soil in, the plant came next, the stalk embedding within the iron-wrought loam, and finally came down the regolith, resting atop the soil like a protective blanket. "Then why haven't you tried proving him right about the revolution he feared?" he asked, settling back to examine his drooping masterpiece. "Why not just say your little secret about life and call it a day when your buddies come to wipe out him in his normal form?"

"He'd vaporize us all in a swipe of his hand if he knew what we were up to," she stated bluntly. "And besides, it's not that easy. This is why there was a requirement of both human and gods to overthrow him entirely. Our secrets meant nothing if we didn't tell humans, and only then would Arceus say something."

"So Yvetal told a bunch of scientists down on Earth that was life on other planets than this one?" he asked.

"That's precisely what he did," admitted Xerneas. "But that was not the secret."

"Then what was it?" Zanz inquired impatiently, spinning his head to glare at her.

Xerneas looked at him, concerned for his violent temperament. She dragged her legs upward to her chest, hugging them tight as her head cradled between her knees. Her horns glowed a faint golden, and there was a small dash of light that emerged from their meeting tips. The sphere of light waggled around inside the quarters for a small time before accelerating to massive speeds into the domed chasm above them. Zanz watched it as it departed from the spacecraft, as it passed through the glassteel and penetrated the eternal dark with its bright illumination.

Then it started zooming off to the distant planet of Jupiter looming high in the space that surrounded them, engulfed by the mere presence of the enlarged gas giant.

"Go follow it," she said, her voice weary and broken. Her beautiful face, he noticed as she picked it up from between her knees, was disparaged, aging with stress. It seemed to exert all her energy to do this, he thought. Her eternal life was shaking at its seams, and here she was, adhering to the selfish want of a man who knew almost nothing of her religion of origin. "Make your captain listen to reason to follow that shred of light. That is where life is – that is where it's heading."

"Jupiter?" asked Zanz, looking to the light as its ebullient jaunt through the stars drew ceaseless, its flickering luminescence a minor contrast to the unblinking stars that spread about the expanse of space visible through the dome above his head.

"Farther than that," she insisted. "There's not much life on the planets past Jupiter, but on a dwarf planet near Pluto, there be prosperous civilization awaiting for me."

Zanz turned to Xerneas, his eyes wide. "You made them?" he inquired.

"Indeed," she agreed. "They do not look like the regular humans that you have come to gaze upon, but they are remotely of the same anatomy, the same DNA, the same species. I made sure of this before Arceus locked me away with my brother."

"So the secret was the creation of a new civilization?"

Xerneas peered at him forlornly. The cogs in her mind worked strenuously, grinding against each other loudly as their tenuous methods of movement were taken into blind consideration. She obviously wished not to reveal herself to him, so she didn't, much to his discomfort. The only thing she did was point to the ceaselessly journeying light she sent forth from her horns with a trembling finger and said three words: "Go to it."


	5. iv

"The gales of air blasted at him from the upper vents that lined the hallways leading to the center of the spacecraft. His loud clamor manifested by the unintentional slamming of his shoes was enough indication that he was on a mission of some sort, but it was he and the blue-hued spirit that followed him which knew its real purpose. His crew mates found him there in the corridors, his face stony, his voice unheard by their unfocused ears. They looked as though they wished to inquire him of his business, but were deterred by the intensity of his stare, which bore into their own irises and told them to stray far away from him.

Zanz smiled, enjoying the isolation outside of his own living quarters. But Xerneas, floating perilously close to his physical body, seemed disparaged. She was worried, concerned that no one would actually listen to him in his insistence of a sliver of life far across the solar system, and Zanz tried to reassure her with little whispers of soothing white lies. As they continued through their jaunt, she grew increasingly pleased, but in her eyes, those glowing diamonds, there was still the frightening discourse that she was afraid of. Yvetal must've done something to her whilst they were both locked in the Rock of Enigmas, he thought, and this is the aftermath of all those ridiculous interactions.

"Where's the captain?" asked Xerneas suddenly.

"If anything, he's still in his quarters. He barely leaves them unless it's absolutely necessary, and it's necessary only when a recourse is called by Houston and forced into fruition by the co-pilots and Lemon. And right now, it's downtime for some, and work for others. If I am correct, he's in a downtime cycle, and is enjoying himself with a good book." He said all this with a humorous tone about his voice, believing almost none of the words which came from his mouth, yet the presumed whereabouts shouldn't be untowards if he knew better.

"And he is the man who came into your quarters, yes?" Xerneas asked briskly.

"Yes," he whispered, keeping his voice low so that passerby individuals didn't hear him speaking to the invisible woman. "He's rather strict, as you've seen."

"Kind of like Arceus, y'know," she exclaimed.

"Except for the fact that Arceus was obsessed in the possibility that his own creations conspired into the destruction of his reign on the universe," said Zanz. He cracked the dainty, blue apparition a faint smile. "The only thing that he's really obsessed with are these stars he's ready to explore. It's hard to tell him that there's no way, at least in this timeline, that he'll be able to see one with his own eyes, omitting the Sun itself."

Xerneas smiled back at him. "You're right," she said softly. "Hopefully he doesn't try to trap you in a rock for thousands of years for telling him that you spoke with me."

"I won't mention you," he said. "I'll just tell him that there is a light that's drawn towards life, and that's what the small little sphere in the vacuum of space is going."

That's true, he thought. I just don't explain where it came from, and I think we'll be all good. He'll definitely think I'm telling the truth if I don't give proper evidence.

Then what? a scornful voice asked him, its place of origin unbeknownst to him. Then you'll have another problem on your hands, with the captain thinking you inconsiderate and untrustworthy.

If that happens, he insisted, I'll just go by my own merits. I want to find plant-life, so I might was well take a stupid little shuttle from the other side of the _Satoshi_ with a few prosperous species of Pokémon and scoot my ass through space with a limited amount of oxygen, Xerneas and my beloved plants. He didn't know if that was his actual plan yet, but if something came along those lines where Lemon refused to listen to him, to be convinced about the fact there was life beyond Jupiter, beyond Saturn, beyond Uranus and Pluto where a small planet sustained life, plants, inhabitable patches wherein humans could live without machinery's assistance, he'd take it upon himself to finish his crew's work on his lonesome.

Lemon wasn't in his living quarters like Zanz had originally suggested. He stood outside the door, knocking on the metal with an enclosed fist, calling the man's name until his voice was hoarse and passerby looked strangely at his growing frustration. Xerneas was afraid to speak to him in this way, he noticed, and he didn't blame her. As antisocial as he was, arguing and yelling at people about inconsequential events such as this was commonplace, lest he go mad bottling it all up without release. He banged his hand against the door again, for good measure, before he backed away, exasperated and angered.

From around the corner, the dark-skinned, bespectacled roboticist named Fredrick Pelo came around with a small replica of a Luxray constructed of metal and exposed wire at his heels, precariously winding through the legs of the man who briskly came through the corridor. His fingers pattered against the touch-receptive surface of a visiplate, inputting codes and orders into its internal storage, and he stopped in his tracks when Zanz gripped the man's arm and pulled him backward. This sent Pelo from the torpor he was resting within, which made him look up at the man before him with an awkward smile.

"Zanz," he said in greeting. Disheveled, he hastily removed the man's hand from his arm, adjusting the clothing that barely hung from his lanky body. The wire-brained Luxray beneath him pressed its body against his leg, and he absently knelt down to placate the creature. Still focused on the astrobotanist, he said, "What might you be doing here?"

Zanz contemplated telling Pelo his intentions. Though he couldn't call the man his friend, or even an acquiantance due to their inability to speak with one another in normal circumstances - and normal circumstances these were not - he didn't want to reveal his inherent psychosis with a near stranger. Clearly, almost all the inhabitants upon the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em was a stranger to him, yet this was not the point he wanted to focus on.  
So, thinking about it for a moment, testing the possibilities which might come from this excursion in the future, he said, "I'm looking for the captain, Pelo. He and I have some business to attend to, and I figured that he was here. He is not, unfortunately. Have you of his whereabouts, perhaps?"

"Certainly, Shakespeare," he joked, gaining nothing more than a frown from the man in question. "He was just on the deck a few minutes ago, talking to me and telling me off for trying to get my robots into the missions coming later." Then his voice got stern and stoic, and Zanz had known this was bound to happen with Pelo. He always violently inserted his insistence of a robot's usefulness on outside missions into conversations where it was unneeded and unnecessary in general, and this was no exception, save for the circumstances broiling upon Lemon's strict attitude as a focal point. "Did you know that the act of putting humans in danger by the orders of the captain is highly unauthorized by the word of the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Space Travel and How to Maintain Human Life, /eman official text written for the prominent operators of a spacecraft? He is refusing to put out my robots in the field due to his unwarranted hatred against them. That's absolutely stupid, really, making us go out when we could be assisted by robots. They always respond to the Three Rules of Robotics, precisely and unimpedingly whenever activated and given an ambiguous order, yet he thinks that they will kill, and that they will attempt to eradicate the outgoing crew if something slightly bad goes wrong."

Zanz grunted. Lemon always hated robots since an unknown event in his past had deterred him from their use, and the crew had known all about this loathing. He expressed it too often for anyone to pass by him and not near his frequent statements about their untrustworthiness, or something of that sort. "Yeah, it's stupid," he said briefly. "Do you know where he is -"

"And something else," continued Pelo cantankerously, interjecting the inquiry that passed through Zanz's lips, "is that this idiocy will soon lead to the deaths of future astronauts that dwell on the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em. Did you know that forty deaths in space have occurred due to human intervention? Remember that a robot has no will of its own unless programmed to have one. It's not right that he's telling me that my robots, who're programmed with only the rudimentary synapses, are dangerous to the life of humans more than the humans. You have surely seen the hatred between Yagama and Keyee, right? Their arguments about the validity of their research has sent them into a life-or-death fight nearly every time that get into it, and soon, one of them'll sneak into the other's living quarters and take them out without hesitation. Would my robots do that? No, of course they wouldn't. They are respectful of a human's life, and cannot commit murder, unlike our homicidal tendencies."

Zanz rubbed his eyes. Xerneas beside him was watching him intently, and stifled a laugh as he opened his mouth again. "Pelo, please, could you just -"  
"Explain why I think so less of our peers?" No, no, I don't want that, thought Zanz, but Pelo continued anyways besides internal notions. "Honestly, with the rivalries shifting from person to person without end, there has been an enormous amount of tension between almost everybody who passes through these very hallways. To give you a for-instance, Derrick and Margaret started an argument right over there the other day pertaining to the best scientist onboard. Obviously, their humility wasn't strong, so -"

Deciding that he was finished with the tangents presented by the roboticist already - and had been since the beginning of the altercation, wanting only a few words between them before he made his way to Lemon - he interjected rudely, "They got into it, and something happened afterward to where the both of them are refusing to speak to one another at the behest of the captain or someone of higher classification. I understand how things like that work around here, Pelo."

"Clarification is all that I was providing," said Pelo innocuously, obviously nonplussed at the interruption.

"It wasn't needed." Zanz stepped aside, to allow him to strut forward. "If you'd like to go, then go. I will not bother you any longer - and I hope the same from you - if I disconnect now to locate the captain." And spinning on his heel to round the corner, he stepped a single foot forward before he heard the frantic sound of Pelo's voice behind him, keeping him from going forward and avoiding him completely.

"I know where he is."

He turned his head over his shoulder. Pelo looked considerably apologetic about the situation and his inability to cease communication when so adamant and passionate towards an observation transplanted into the conversation by completely obsolete means. If Zanz was not already annoyed by the man, he would have bashfully forgiven him for wasting his precious time and keeping him in a circuitous loop of speech that ended only in angry interruption; instead, he was its correspondent juxtaposition, and wished to demonstrate to the man his disposition in full. "Then tell me already," he snapped.  
"He's in the cockpit. He was heading there after our -"

Zanz refused to listen to another word from Pelo's chapped lips, and the corner was rounded with Xerneas following steadily behind him, watching him with glowing eyes as his frustration grew increasingly high. He clamped down his jaw, clenching his teeth together. His hands were curled in angry fists, ready to be swung and deliver suffering beyond regular anticipation. His eyes spread a wildfire in the depths of his verdant, nigh heartless soul, and it showed in his livid expression, too. All that passed knew to stick to the walls and avoid the man's reach until they were finally away from him and his impeding gaze. If Xerneas had wanted to talk to him, she didn't know, and he was appreciative for this.

The cockpit of the ship was only a ten minute walk, so Zanz made the trek in a short amount of time, making his strides elongated to accommodate the length it took to get there. His hitherto conversation with another person that didn't appear to be there was kept hidden by means of his inaudible whispers, even more obfuscated by the fact that no one came within three feet of his presence, knowing violence was on the horizon if interaction wad brought into fruitless fruition.

The door to the cockpit was locked, so he knocked, rapping upon its surface three times. The thundering sounds roused the captain from his demanding, and the intercom ceased its broadcasts of Lemon's voice as he moved from his comfortable throne and walked to the door, peeking through sliver of space between the doorway and the door.

"Zanz?" he asked.

"Yes, sir, it's me," replied Zanz.

"To what do I owe this greeting?"

"Nothing much, sir." He pointed into the cockpit. "May I speak to you personally?"

Lemon waited a moment. The stillness was momentarily paralyzing. Zanz didn't breath one lungful hitherto Lemon's nodding head. "Ah, of course. Come in, come in," said the captain, spreading the door open to allow entrance for Zanz.

Zanz entered the cockpit and was seated beside Lemon, who rested behind the one of the two helm-adorning co-pilots in a comfortable seat similar to the one Zanz himself occupied. There were panels covering the armrests, so he avoided touching any of the visible buttons displayed on the screens. Lemon, however, flickered his fingers against its surface with a deftness persisting from his hands. In a few mere moments, though, he stopped these gesticulations altogether, otherwise focusing on Zanz. He folded his hands and pointed at him.

"So what's your business? You need more funding for your astrobotany like Shi and his astrobiology? If it's so, there's no point in asking me. We've been shot in terms of economic flexibility since our venture to Mars. And since the journey to the clouds of Jupiter for our correspondence on Earth will perhaps decrease the minor amount we have in bank with the purchase of authorized man-controlled probes and the rest of the nanosuits required for the other men, it's unethical to truly invest in lackluster projects that will go under the moment your predicted research is false and proven wrong by actual testing. Remember: not only am I a captain for this ship, but I was a scientist like you once, too, and I know that more than most, trust me."

Zanz waited for the man to finish, and replied, "It is not anything about funds. I have a proposition for you."

He raised a sleek blonde eyebrow. Intrigued, he said, "Speak on it, then. I want to know exactly what you're getting into before I send you on your merry way with whatever."

"I believe that I know where life might exist elsewhere in this solar system," he said suddenly, breathing kept to a minimum within his incredulous exclamation.

Lemon's face needn't demonstrate reaction, as his widened eyes bespoke the surprise he experienced from Zanz's unprecedented declaration. "Excuse you?" he asked.

"I believe you heard me, sir," he said stubbornly. He knew he might rile up the captain in the process, yet he did not quite care at the moment. "I have a hunch that there is life thriving far beyond the realm which Pluto orbits the sun. And I wish for you to go to it."

"A hunch?" Lemon shook his head. "Nuh-uh. That's really not quite enough to warrant a recourse of the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em, y'know. We have - maybe three, four weeks until we take ourselves into the atmosphere of Jupiter to collect samples. It's not worth it to tell Houston that there's something unproven across the horizon of the solar system due to an astrobiologist's thought that there might be something past Pluto."  
"Astrobotanist," corrected Zanz cantankerously. Then, quickly, he added: "Sir."

Lemon glared at him with sharp eyes. "You're treading a line with hasty feet, plant-boy. Make sure you know where that threshold is."

"I do, sir," replied Zanz. "Yet I implore to listen to me. Seriously, I have intense reason to believe that there is something beyond Pluto that sustains life."

Lemon leaned back into his seat, his eyebrows relaxing above his blue eyes so that they appeared darkened, vile, malignant. A standard antagonist, thought Zanz, thinking about the stories that he read in his downtime sometimes. If he had a mustache instead of the rough stubble that encapsulated his jaw and upper and lower lips, then there would be a visage of that very notion. Zanz waited for a few moments, watching Lemon think, contemplate whether he should kick the botanist out or keep him here and listen. Deciding upon the latter, he said impatiently, "I am listening."

"Great." His voice was shaking. "Now, as you might have known already, there are thousands of stars in the vacuum of space surrounding us. And they all are stagnant, remaining in one place. Well, last night, when I was looking at them all, I saw a strange light pierce through the immobile presence of the sky. It was blue and bright, and it seemed to be in the shape of a cervine that is known in the religion of Arceus as the god of Life, Xerneas, and I believe it's a sign."

"A sign?" he asked accusingly. "What're you, some sort of superstitious? Look, I don't want to have this conversation with someone who believes in theology more than the science presented to them at the moment. I expected more from you, plant-kid, and you seemed like you had promise. Truly, you looked an atheist, and I was happy that you were amongst the majority of our little crew here. Turns out you aren't. Y'know how betrayed I feel right now?"

"No, sir, I don't," he said quickly.

"Well, just know that it's in high numbers, in high levels, just like your supposed gods and goddesses." He snorted. "Who ever heard of such stupid things, eh? You even have a book for your made-up beings so you can think higher of yourself. It's inane, y'know."

Beside Zanz, Xerneas, glowing bright, looked as though she were going to kill the unbelieving man where he stood. Blast him into blackness of space, maybe. He entertained the fleeting thought before giving her a stern, sidelong glance without turning his head too conspicuously. She relaxed, yet he could still feel the emanating force of hatred in her aura.

"Well, I just believe that my beliefs could potentially lead us to where an inhabitable planet may exist. It's the only plausible conclusion which coincided with my visions and -"

"You sure you're just not going insane, plant-boy? Truly, you sound like you've gone mad. Premonitions and visions are things of fiction and are tropes used to explain away things that cannot be explained scientifically. Ask yourself this: did you come to this conclusion because you are adept in the religious figures of the Earth, or did you bump your head against the ground and hallucinate all of these things you've told me?"

"Sir, I can confirm that these things occurred, if you'd give me the chance to prove myself."

Lemon gave him a questioning look. "And you've already proven yourself to be a liability to me and my purpose here due to your dwindling mind. It's increasingly hard to think that you are intelligent enough to properly conceive things that are in front of you." He held up two fingers, questioning the man what he saw.

"I see two fingers."

"And you've also seen things that don't exist, y'know," said Lemon in return, snidely remarking this with a disgusted grimace upon his face. "You say it was a bright light that you saw, right?"

Zanz, exasperated by Lemon's incessant disbelief, nodded vigorously.

Lemon rubbed his chin, feeling the stubble beneath his fingers. "We are in space, plant-boy. Now it should come to your knowledge that we have multiple spacecrafts within the seas of stars, shooting their way through the solar system with struggles all different and all originated from different sources. Associate this with your knowledge of the light. You see the way they deliver light from their interiors?"

"Yes, but -"

"Do you also," Lemon interrupted, a small flame blazing in the depths of his irises, "know that they can emit such presences of light with ease by such methods of eminence?" His face was growing bright, his cheeks a rosy red that spread athwart the features of stress lines and scarred tissue.  
Zanz was ready to pull out his own hair and feed it to the man in front of him. Pushing his hand through a handful of it, and biting down on his lip, he refused to yell at Lemon, lest he be thrown from the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em forthwith. "But I know what I saw, and the deer-like creature that was manifested from the light could not be created by an artificial source," he insisted. "It was natural, and zoomed through the velvety blackness, sir. It seriously came from this ship right here: not by a flashlight or phospor-oriented machinery, but by a creature of higher being. A goddess, presumably."

Lemon laughed at this. He seemed to find the statements hilarious, and was wheezing and holding his sides with adamance as he leaned forward and laughed until he couldn't anymore. Zanz watched abhorrently. He didn't like where any of this was going, and it definitely wasn't floating in his favor. Maybe he could leave before he was ostracized and try again when he wasn't feeling as though he were going to vomit in the nearest rubbish bin. When Lemon returned from his prolonged bout sinister sniggering, he looked sternly at the man with those cold, torrent-blue eyes, and said in an equally serious intonation, "Maybe it was conceived purely by the goddess of which you idiotically speak of, but technologies we know and operate could also manifest a sort of luminescence like the one talked about. Besides, it's not too inconsiderate to believe that it was derived from science itself. Are you strictly religious, plant-kid?"  
"No, sir," he grumbled unhappily.

Lemon knew that the argument was already won by the face that he made at Zanz. He crossed his arms, and said, "Then why speak of spiritual origin of observed lights when you know full well that they could be generated by a scientific source?"

Lemon had him there. All of these godless heathens upon the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em did not think of anything else was true except the facts of science presented in front of them, including Lemon, an electrotechnician whose work was revered throughout the ship as exemplary. Collateral disbelief in one of the gods that Zanz saw with his very own eyes was widely accepted as nothing odd. He was not religious, nay; instead, he were a man of scientific thought and mathematic approach to all things in the universe.

Yet the grotesque way with which he discarded this old adage, though, was deft and precarious, surely, and he needn't justify his belief whilst there was Xerneas standing next to the pilot, her glowing figure innocuously illuminating the side of his stony face as his gaze never left the visage of stars. The wrinkles on the sides of his face were caught in the crosshairs of her life-giving aura, and they suspiciously disappeared in the coming seconds as her hand meandered dangerously close to his skin. He did not notice the shift in appearance, Zanz observed, the reflection of his immobile expression unchanging in the effects of her otherworldly presence. She gasped a small sound of surprise as it healed and became young again, and she looked worriedly at Zanz, as though he were going to do something to reverse her powers.

I can't do anything, he thought. She'll have to deal with the fact that she undo her irrevocably obnoxious actions, and the pilot'll have to have a lopsided face dwindling between the look of an aging, somber, elder man and a young, vibrant, efflorescent handsome adult. He sniggered at the notion, and turned back to Lemon.

"It's a hunch, sir," he said conclusively, his voice a trifle humorous. Then it straightened once more, changing quickly to a steady, unwavering intonation that boasted artificial confidence. "I do not have much evidence to refer to, but I do have my memory, and I remember what I saw."  
"Eye witnesses aren't as appreciated in here, in space as much as they are in the court of law, plant-boy."

Zanz said nothing in return.

Lemon took a long look at Zanz, his eyes scrutinizing each movement he made, criticizing his thoughts as though he could derive them straight from his mind, finger through their conspicuous contents and refer him to the authorities for his acts of treason aboard the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi. /emThe air was still with the tension pulling tight between them, and a single sever could pierce the atmosphere which floated amid them. Zanz breathed uneasily beneath Lemon's unaltering gaze.

"Okay, I have an idea. And if you refuse, that's your choice. There is a Hubb sitting dormant in one of the large airlocks at the back of the ship. And it's still operational, if I think I am being right. I think that it has enough fuel in stock for you to make an extended trek that lasts long enough for your ... nine year travel past the dwarf of Pluto," Lemon announced finally. "If you locate life where you think it to be, contact the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em and I will congratulate you in your efforts. You must supply your evidence within your contact with us again. I will make it a point of reference to periodically speak to you via visiplate and confirm or deny your progress. And if you do not find what you say is out there, then I ask that you please em style="box-sizing: border-box;"do not/em return to the em style="box-sizing: border-box;"Satoshi/em ever again. I must reiterate: em style="box-sizing: border-box;"do not come back if you fail/em. You should know that I don't like failures and theists on my ship unless they are following orders, and for one to return from a mission without the proper objectives completed warrants nothing but a bad reputation for me."

"But sir -"

"But nothing," snapped Lemon, slamming his fist against the panels of the armrest. The invisible buttons which laid stagnant underneath his curled fingers activated myriad operations within the cockpit.

He rushed to deactivate these actions, which included the aloof movement of a miniature drone hovering above Zanz's head, suspending a small package filled with straw-dispensed foods. It was presumably for the captain whenever he was hungry and requested a meal, but now, as it precariously floated overhead, it was an inadvertent weapon with which the captain could dispose of him.

As the operations went off one by one, Zanz was quick to think. He leapt from the seat, landing noisily on his feet, as the drone crashed into the comfort of his hitherto seat, spilling the liquids drawn from the orange-colored straws upon the fabric covering its enormity. It splashed recklessly on the armrest panels. The display screen then went black as it sparkled with malfunction.

"Bah!" shouted Lemon. He wiped away the liquids covering the panels as Zanz carefully backed away to the rear wall of the cockpit, avoiding the wild, unconditioned sensations of anger and loathing that throbbed up his arms and fueled his frustrated movements. Once Lemon was done removing the liquid from the seat, he guided his livid eyes upon the lithe figure of Zanz plastering his back to the wall, his mouth curled into an evil sneer.

"Pick one, you rugged biologist or botanist, whatever you are," he offered furiously, the flame that sparked long before in their conversation fueled to an extreme pyre that stretched thoroughly into the miniscule length of his deep cobalt irises. "Either you take a shuttle from here and go search for that stupid deer floating through the cosmos with a few of those useless Pokémon in the storage hull, or return to your damn quarters to just do your work and keep your ass out of my hair."

Zanz shifted anxiously on his feet, refocusing his position to straighten on the balls of his heels. "When do I leave?"


	6. v

Xerneas, it seemed, had an affinity with the technologies invented by the innovative humans she overlooked for millennia before her eventual capture.

Zanz had first experienced this when she broached the topic of personal computers and artificial intelligences, for which she was queerly knowledgeable of, despite the impeding, pertinent fact she had been trapped away for several centuries, enabling her incapable of receiving thus information. She didn't share the reasoning of her knowledge, causing Zanz to question exactly how she operated within the parameters set upon her, and growing querulous in the insistence of finding it out. He found it futile, however, after a few weeks of constant inquiry and her refusal to relinquish her own secrets, the ones she kept for millennia. He decided not to dwell and constrain himself to his fleeting fact, yet it was difficult in and of itself.

Despite his incessant pressure to understand how she knew about the inventions of twenty-first century (the mere thought of it eluded him), she continuously proceeded with her desperate attempts to obtain more information about the uncertain abstracts of their technologies and how they worked, sometimes interfacing with the apparatuses herself whenever Zanz allowed himself to draw achingly closer. She soon became weary of inquiring of these escapades, for every time she mentioned any word of human invention, he would heave a great sigh of resignation, questioning listlessly why she wished to indulge within such avocations whilst he was working. Increasingly, however, she never wholly stopped, sometimes asking him frequently, sometimes asking him infrequently. The dialects with which she used to persuade him to bring her abroad, away from the isolationism of his dank quarters, would also change to reflect his moods, and it was that which became his only weakness.

While he found it cantankerous, he knew she would not supply him with the necessary information required to fully embrace the impact of their contiguous mission. So, even in the darkest of shadowed occurrences and in the brightness of a new chemical found in the chlorophyll of a plant's veins, he obliged, although his strenuous reluctance lowered in intensity somewhat in the coming weeks of their shared presence.

This was on the _Satoshi_. It never abated, though. For this, he was certain.

And as Zanz pranced uneasily about the Hubb with his white socks padding soundlessly upon the ground, tensely holding a foreign fruit he classified as Mars potatoes due to their similar texture and taste in his clenched hand, she stood at the controls with her transparent hands shoved experimentally within the panels and screens which rid the surface of the dashboard. He focused not on her, but of her mere enormity, the fact wherein she could control the entire ship by herself and even throw them farther than possibly conceived. With the assistance of a god who shared nothing but a dawning admiration for the sciences of humans, it appeared that the Hubb, whose max acceleration topped at an approximate thirty meters per second, could travel as fast as the speed of light beaming across the universe, perhaps even faster. She imbued it with some sort of life, he concurred, and no further did he question the ways of the god, rather keeping to himself in these unsecular regards.

Xerneas took breaks, of course, but whenever she exited her status as domineer of the derelict shuttle, she became meek in the modest exertion of her godly abilities. Unfortunately, she no longer glowed like she did hitherto their venture into space, exuding such a radiance that Zanz sometimes shielded his eyes to prevent himself from blindness. She had a lustrous, vibrant appearance that shone through the boundless gales of shadow blowing through the universe, yet now she looked weak, unstable, ready to snap at any kind of contention. Her dress, which was an elegant fabric with seams laden with sequins and shining geodes, was now peppered in holes and left in mere tatters that haggardly swept at her feet as she floated about, brushing against her pale, translucent legs. Her hair was a decrepit mess, mottled with unknown liquids, knots and whatnot.

The only thing which refused to abate, however, was the glow of her horns, which he commonplace forgot existed so high above her head. Seven individual crystals infused within the bright ivory, all a different color of the rainbow spectrum. They pulsated, palpitated, making rhythmic sounds, strangely like that of a standard, undisturbed heartbeat. Yet he knew not to disturb the natural laws of godhood by asking folly such as the catalyst which brought upon her the horns violating the top of her head. Besides, the explanations given by the definition of truth she wholly believed were enough to addle the mind with unprecedented craze and madness. No one wished to suffer amongst that unease and meagerness; not even Zanz.

With the Mars potato in hand, he walked to the dashboard. Xerneas's eyes glowed a bright white, the irises nowhere to be seen, as she shoved her hands willingly into the sides of the shuttle and sent it hurtling forward to the planet obscured by Pluto. She was willing to go the extra mile in order to secure that her world, the creational oath she swore to uphold, and the apothegms which forwarded their venture were dangerous and precarious in measurement, but she insisted, fully integrating her presence into the journey instead of leaving it all to the stress-addled body of Christopher Zanz.

He outstretched a hand. Its fingers curled and uncurled to test their firmness, and he experimentally thrust it toward in the chance that it would rouse her from her sworn-fueled reverie. It shot an agony through his, shoving his hand through her shoulder with his entire lanky weight, but as he retracted and wagged his hand from side to side, bemoaning the agony he suffered through alone, he saw that her eyes closed a smidgen, and the eyelids which covered the irises lowered to reveal only a minor portion of her eyes. She turned listlessly to him, her weary expression carrying the souls of millions.

"Christopher," she said, her voice barely bobbing above the threshold of audible sound. The worry lines covering her face and the ethereal veins that pulsated underneath demonstrated annoyance, yet she did not say anything harmful. She never did, he knew. She would not want to inflict pain - whether emotional or physical, she didn't care - unto another living being, her thoughts jumbled with their pure, benevolent creation and their presence within the writhing cesspool of endlessly tempting sins that defiled their bodies and brought them to grim and dirt. "Has anything happened?" she added breathlessly, her intonation dying out.

An atrocious irony, he thought. The goddess of Life losing her own source of immortality and endowment by her own selfishness. He shook away the jesting indifference that broiled on his mind. Blasphemous, it was, and he needn't dwell upon such notions with the full knowledge of their impossibilities. "Yes, something has happened," he said in response.

Her eyes widened only slightly, displaying the weariness which plagued her transparent body in agonizing torrents. "And that something is?" she asked.

"A break," he said, demanding. He moved to push her aside. "You're wasting away here at the controls. You need a break."

Denial pooled in her eyes, swirling rapidly through the unjust fruition of the shuttle. She ushered away from him, careful to not allow his fingers to touch her dress nor her transparent skin. "No," she insisted. "We'll get there faster with my assistance."

"I do not want you dissipating into nothingness for a stupid planet, y'know," he reasoned with the adamant women. "You might die if you continue this, or even worse than that."

Yet she stood as still as an eroding rock on the edges of a beach, berated by the unbidden tides that continuously splashed upon its jagged surface. Her hands hadn't trembles for hours, but they did now, tremulous in the tenaciousness of Zanz's insistence. "I cannot die," she said matter-of-factly, her voice not so much snapping as releasing the tension that tugged her heart and mind with its enormous weight. "I am an immortal."

"Yes, but I suggest that you deprive yourself from the tech," he said firmly. "You said yourself that you alone had abilities that would be replenished once you set foot on Erdenwald, yes?"

"So what?" she asked breathlessly.

He shrugged at the comment, unfazed by its innate sharpness. No quaver entered his voice as he spoke. He said, "Then it would be logical that your internal energy would likely dissipate alongside your appearance. You've already deteriorated in the physical department, I must say. You look rather torn and ragged. A god shouldn't even have tears or rips in their immaculate pieces of clothing unless they themselves willed it to occur, although I am sure that you had not known of your own discourse whilst your focus was entangled within the lightspeed of the Hubb. An ailment of such magnitude would cease your ability to spiritually manifest yourself right here, and I would assume thus actions would be merely undesirable, wouldn't you agree?"

Her facial features wavered. "Yes, I would," she said lowly.

"Then bereave yourself, please, for the sake of yourself, and my own, too."

The ardent woman peered at him with germinating unease. Her eyes had sensed something of pleading within his voice, the desperation with which he bespoke his desires seeping through her, relegating the illogical disposition adopted by her contiguous state with the extinct computer that once lived in its data files. With a reluctance, she had unhooked her hands from the dashboard, and the myriad screens clogged with warning windows ignored in the heat of her control grew blank and inert as she slowly floated from it. Her eyes had terminated their pure-white eeriness, reverting to their regular coloration. The scintillating methodology wasn't brought to Zanz's attention, for he turned on his heel and whipped around to grab another Mars potato for the woman to share with him.

As she floated listlessly amid the spacious hull of the Hubb, he had retrieved the potato from the red-rust stalk that expanded upward a meter in the small space of the cargo hull. The discolored skin and innards of the vegetable exposed to the goddess as he cut it in half with a sharpened blade. The half was tossed through the atmosphere, and Xerneas caught it with a surprised gasp, the reddened vegetable leaping from lithe finger to lithe finger. He was impressed to see that the incorporeal spirit had caught the tangible object within her grasp, clenching it tight in her fists, and he held up his own half in toast and accomplishment. "To great ventures," he said proudly, zealous beyond conceivable recognition.

"To apropos prosperity," she said, smiling, and touched the tip of her Mars potato with his.

As they animatedly ate the stale, unsalted food, Zanz more aggressive with his angry hunger fueling him to devour the plant, he noticed that she kept anxiously glancing over her shoulder to the control panels, her eyes flashing with guilt and remorse. Morosely, she had looked there. It drew her, he knew, yet he did not choose to impede upon her own desires.

Instead, he held a curious inquiry he'd been meaning to ask for awhile: "What happened to that one man spoken in the chronicles of the Book of Arceus?"

Xerneas had crossed her legs, trying to attempt eating the vegetable that he had thrown to her, and his voice alarmed her, triggering a protective response in the form of a blast wave that shuddered the shuttle's enormity. He was bound back, and his spine slammed precariously upon the cool metal of the rear. He strained to keep himself upright in the midst of his pain, yet it need not subside to already affect his body in the extremities. The force was enough for him to nearly soil himself, surprised by its suddenness, and Xerneas cooed a bit as he straightened himself, his uncoiling and readjusting by the aid of his stiff, frigid hands. The resolute sound of the potato smacking the floor rang in his ear alongside the bemoaning exclamations rapidly escaping the lips

"I'm so sorry," she said quickly, waving her hands around as she closed in on his presence. "Yvetal used to do that to me, and it's the only way to make him stop, y'know. He crept through the shadows, acclimating himself to the melded cavernous confines of the Rock of Enigmas, and frightened me immensely with his booming voice." She melded through this with a sound mantra of "I'm so sorry" that germinated into pure, pristine obnoxiousness before long.

When he asked her to stop fussing and to help him, she obliged. Her familiar hands raked down his spine and healed it immediately, whereupon the nigh fractured bone had been miraculously repaired. He swore to himself that he would research the afflictions of her aura and its properties, yet he thought better of it at the moment, rather focusing on the beautiful woman hovering so near to him. The hammering of his heart was probably engendered by the mere prospect of injury he just abounded, although he truly wasn't sure of the axiom of the situation just yet.

He broached the subject again after she seemed mitigated in her innate potential to fatally harm him.

She flushed. "Valentino, you mean?" she asked.

"I assume that is the man in question," agreed Zanz.

She sighed. Then entered the monologue: "He was a good man. A sinless man ridden with disease incurable. The epidemic which afflicted had brought him to debilitating upheaval, and Arceus hand-selected this man to test the moralities of his creations as if he had not seen us regulate the life to death ratio of the world. Hitherto, I assisted childbirth by means of soothing whispers to the belabored women and her anxious companion whilst he made himself useful in the constant retrieval of souls that ventured forth through life by means of death to place them inconsequentially into the meaningless depths of the Dark Realm. Yet Arceus paid attention not to the occupations we followed selflessly, so he plucked us from our respective affinities and sent us to either assist or corrupt this man as he crawled onward to the daunting inevitability of death.

"Valentino was thirty-five. Marred with welts that covered his face, he was going about his ways in the marketplace when I first encountered him. He was shunned for his appearance, so no one sold to the man that looked as though he were stung by a thousand Beedrills. Arceus dangled Yvetal from his string just close above him, brooding with his arms crossed, yet I decidedly paid no attention to him as I instantaneously knew the mission I was to complete. My humanoid form was not fully germinated at the time, and as I seldom escaped through the reality of human women and their significant ability to charm and chastise a man, it was hard to effectively use my allure upon him. So I came to him as the human woman you see before you, but without the transparent blue aura I now adopt to prevent confusion amid transient propagators. Flesh and blood, my organs in operation, I came to him with an enthused attitude.

"He looked at me perplexed. Perhaps he had never seen someone like me in the flesh, for his cheeks flared a rose-red and his mouth curled definitely in an awkward smile that produced an adorable look on his face. I approached him, whereupon I asked him where he was going. He divulged to me the meaning of his jaunt ti the marketplace, and I, by Arceus's suggestion, made him a deal: I would stay by his side and preform a witchcraft magic that healed him of his disease for nothing more than the price of two large Salamances. He was aghast at the prospect, yet made the deal nonetheless, hugging me tightly when he found himself abound with jubilance.

"Then Yvetal had been drawn into the picture. As Tino crossed the forests to go home, he ran into a suited man whose black-and-red attire and correspondent eyes. I was hanging there, out of view and unseeable by the humans that roamed the lands, on a single string that was bound to my back, hanging there to watch in abhorrence as Yvetal wove his words of devout deviance and convinced the diseased man that he wasn't ever going to be healed of his illness and should stray far from witchcraft and other methodologies of intense healing. Yvetal left his presence wholly triumphant, returning to me with his face contorted icily into a grin that spun malevolence and distraught in my soul.

"Throughout the weeks, we individually met with the man on occasions queer and odd in conception, and Tino did not question our motives after a week or two, deciding that inquiry would be fruitless in the eyes of a sane man unaffiliated with mindless disease and mirthful emotions. He looked increasingly amused and excited whenever I came around during the morning, adorned in a midnight blue cloak that shrouded my face from strangers that occasionally wandered the forests like nomadic vagrants, and his face fell to despair whenever the sun fell underneath the folds of the horizon, a harbinger for the demonic individual who mocked and sardonically mentioned his death as if he were speaking of the beginning of Pokémon battles and their amusing disposition.

"I asked Arceus one time why exactly he had us doing this to this sinless man, especially tormenting him with the intervention of Yvetal. He remained silent like he normally did, mute and unresponsive no matter the specific string of words brought unto him. The cosmos amid him roiled ceaselessly as the constellations stagnated their position to a rigid monopoly that reigned the skies. He knew nothing of the mortals he created by his thousand invisible hands, and it was my job, and Yvetal's, too, to study them, learn from their past mistakes, and assist the next generation with the knowledge of the past and the hopefulness for the future. I once attempted to create my own life, and they now live on Erdenwald. Besides, his monasteries required his presence, he insisted telepathically after he seemed fed up with my tenacity, and he disappeared with a single pop as he warped to wherever he went. He made sure that was far away from me.

"And when I returned to Earth with the convictions of someone who knew the fullest intentions of my overlord, I went to pay my respects to the man in full. I know how selfish it may seem, but I simply didn't want him to die so soon in his life. He was merely at the ripe age of twenty when he was affected with his ailment, and it soon abounded him frivolously until his date of death. Yvetal relished in the thought of the man dying, although he seemed rather somber about it in post, when Tino was gone and our love went along with it. He sinfully degraded me whilst he tormented Tino, but I'm assuming this was without reason. He never wanted me to be happy. He never wanted anybody, nor anything to be gleeful, always wishing for destructive of the largest sort.

"I visited him on a day that was radiant and undulating with mirth that I could not resist indulging in. He offered to take me to the market where we initially met, and I told him that I would be delighted. I was, truly, and I enjoyed being around him. I -" She paused a moment, as though the words were egregiously tearing at her throat, preventing their ascent into speech. She cleared her throat then, making sure to continue. "I soon began to love him after a time," she added with a look of melancholy encapsulating her eyes, shrouding them consequentially. "Whilst we were at the market, he bought me a bouquet of flowers scrounged by the withering form of a Flowette, and when the shopkeep had said to Tino that he was also selling the Flowette, he turned to me in apprehension. He was a poor man who afford not much for himself throughout the week, scouring for whatever he could around the village until someone gracious enough would bestow upon him blessed currency, which he used to feed himself and the local Pokémon that frequented his abode. There was trepidation in his dark eyes, something I had seen never before in him, and the abhorrent thought that Yvetal, who was so selfish and manipulative that he gave no thought of others whenever he employed his schemes, invaded his mind was at the forefront of my own. So I urged him on to purchase the Flowette with the promise that I would continue caring for her, taking the burden of her from him so he could live peacefully. And so he had, and gave her off to me.

"That night, I set aside that little one after giving her some rejuvenation, reviving her to her old self, the merriment which was so long and forgotten by the poor soul engulfing her very being. She gratefully nuzzled me as I told her I would be back from my endeavors shortly, and I walked to Tino's little shack as the moon above waned with illumination so bright that I wondered if she was doing this just for me. He awakened from his slumber and came to the door when I knocked, and ushered me in when I asked for entrance. At that moment, I simply stood awkwardly amid his abode, staring listlessly at the items which piled upon his floor. He told me of his meeting with the strange hooded man which visited him each night, and relinquished his frights and scares about Yvetal and his inherently unnerving disposition. I reassured him with my welcoming presence, enveloping him within a hug that was gratefully returned. He squeezed me as though I was the last tether of his, and he asked me if he would ever be able to pay me for my still undone restoration. He wished to be seen as something attractive again, to live life without the prospect of children fleeing from his proximity at the mere sight of his face, or the rising thought of never be loved by another individual for the rest of his days.

"And I, for the life of me, began my affairs with him then and there. I relished in telling him that he was loved by me, and when he asked me how much, and how it could be so, I revealed to him myself. I had never done that to a human before, had never given myself completely to the physical and mental appreciation of sexual intercourse with a human due to the fact that it was abhorred by Arceus. But it felt good, and even though it was wrong by all accounts, I felt no inclination to stop such endeavors. I rode him into the night, and he was grateful for me in every shape imaginable. The next day, when I returned to his shack in the forest with my hair disheveled and my lips still feeling the taste of his, I went about releasing him of his ailment. Surely, I was not allowed to do this by virtue of allowing the human to ride out their disease, no matter how intense or harmful it may be to them, but I wanted to. I wanted to relinquish him from his pain and suffering, and throughout the day, I set out to do this very thing. He was complacent throughout the altercation, pleasantly quiet amid the process as I healed him with my perceived magic, and when it was all over, he finally looked whole again. He touched his face for without trepidation for the first time since he was inflicted, and thanked me over and over again for my generosity.

"That is all for now," she concluded. "You need rest."

And he did, he noticed. His eyes drooped significantly, eyelids dropping lower than he expected, and he yawned, signifying the worst: exhaustion was slowly creeping through him and bemoaning death. He stood from his position, slowly dragging his feet to the commandeering chair. He fastened the seatbelt across his chest and wound it round his waist, clicking it in with a resolute snap, and he wished Xerneas a good night's sleep as he slowly ventured into the realm of dreams and nightmares. He was unconscious within seconds, head slumped against his shoulder as his uneven, ragged breathes escaped his chapped lips irregularly.

Xerneas gave him a weary look as she pushed her hands back into the controls. Her eyes glowed a sudden bright red, by she sedated it within seconds, refusing the possession that sunk itself deep within the confines of the shuttle. Its hostility was untoward in the goddess's soul, yet it slowly persisted once she thought it was bereaved from her person completely. The axiom had been the corruption of life with the abounded ratio to death, and now, she couldn't help but slump and wait patiently as she willed the shuttle onward, speeding through the vacuum of space with an insistence that both fought off the demon to impose itself within her and sent the shuttle hurdling amid the stars.

She whispered, "You won't get away with this, Yvetal. It is not time."


	7. vi

The cargo hull, smaller than what was supposed to be a walk-in closet down on Earth, was cold and damp and darkened like the soul of a demon. The frigidity that accompanied farther out from the Sun wound around the shuttle and closing its fingers to imbue it with unfathomable chilliness, keeping it in its purchase at all times. The whining of Pokémon freezing beneath the conditions of the cold was a cacophony, a melodic music which resonated unreasoably against the claustrophobic metallic walls.

But as far as the spaces in the _Hubb_ went, this was the only reasonable place for momentary isolation, so he would have to settle settle. Forcing open the doors and squeezing past the broken panels which refused to allow him entrance, he sighed in exertion as he sat cross-legged between the two cages which carried his Pokémon. The male and female Growlithes, who alone made up the consensus of his fur-mottled companions, followed hungrily at the smell of roasted plant, their noses twitching and sniffing at the food he planned to eat. He transferred his gaze momentarily to the small creatures, and reached out with his free hand to pet the female's clean fur, the orange, white and yellow mixture feeding through the spaces betwixt his fingers. She purred underneath his stroking, enjoying the touch, and Zanz smiled to himself.

Slowly, he looked down at his plate, the steam which toiled noiselessly round his rosy cheeks rising from it. He had such difficulty finding a personal space that could not inflame the enormity of the Hubb, and when he did, it had been a hassle trying to set his small portable flame underneath the dish that now held his food. The whole process was a tangent that spread too long, and now as he sat, he smelled them, a exultance that filled him with succulent merriment abounding his whole body.

The overhead lights illuminated the plastic dishware, shone brightly on the assortment of vegetables and fruits that splayed athwart its surface. There was a rainbow of colors on the plate, but all of them were muted, to the point where their vibrancy no longer amazed and enthralled him. The dingy colorations they now adopted were fairly unspeakable, yet he devoured them with the aggressive desire that his stomach imposed through his synapses.

Then he saw that a small red light had illuminated the very front of the Hubb through the circular window that peered in and out of the cargo hull's interior. It had glowed a tremendous hue, a crimson so unfathomably bright that he had to cover his eyes for a brief moment. The two Growlithes seemed to have embodied his very temperament, for they looked there, too, their eyes wide with fright, their mouths agape and ready to bark and snap at an intruder if they came into view, their hind legs prepared for springing upward and striking.

Zanz had lifted himself from the cool ground, setting his vegetables aside, when he heard a shriek originating from the front of the shuttle. It had been feminine, and he automatically thought it to be Xerneas. Pushing forward and ringing his fingers around the opening of the cargo hull, he pushed the door to the right, whereupon he was thrown to the ground by the very same red light he saw hitherto. The force that struck him had ruptured his lungs and many of the organs that had taken refuge underneath his flesh, and this unbearable agony had accompanied the pain that strained through the back of his head. It slammed against the warm metal he was sitting upon earlier.

He tried movement of his legs and arms and torso, yet there was no respond from the muscles exempt of the contemptuous strain that plagued them. His head was immobile, but his eyes could still move around, their blue irises flicking about uselessly. A shred of red light had encapsulated the front of his visage. Frightened by the conception of being still as an unknown power crawled to cull him, he had attempted movement once more. Futile though it was, he still tried with all the might of a man who wished death not at all.

Alas, he remained stagnant, and the growing hue of red had approached, as scornful as its existence might be. It ran across the edge of his vision, licking at it like a hesitant Deerling lapping water from a vaguely unsafe riverbank. Then it abounded with the presence of a red-figured spirit that floated imperviously through the gravity that held down humans and animals altogether. The long, hook-nosed face of the man that looked down at him was wrought with an expression of domination. His high eyebrows dwelled over the man's sunken eyes of deep, inconceivable red. There was an apropos choler amid their placid gaze. Garbed in a suit of indistinguishable color, the transparent spirit appeared to be harboring a vindictive aura about him, but the patient smile on his face had possessed the tranquil gratitude of a man incapable of harming something as insignificant as a peaceful, innocuous Butterfree.

Still, this did not fool Zanz into acquiesce. After a few instances of perplexity pertaining to the calm, unmoving man that stood toweringly above him, the germinating confusion had abated for him to fully realize who the man was and exactly what he wanted from him.

"Yvetal," he said in a low, angry voice. His chest still garnered a pain that constricted ceaselessly around his lungs, squeezing them experimentally to test their fragility. And though he assumed his bones were strong and sturdy through the rejuvenation serums they provided him during his training back on Earth, the power of forced gravity would always rupture a man's internal organs if they had been pushed beyond their standard capabilities of pressure resistance.

His eyes had glowed a brighter red at the whisper of his name. "You know of me, then," said the god of Death with an air of jubilance and excitement. "Excellent. I can skip the whole 'I-am-the-God-of-Death' thing that I usually have to do (it's quite annoying, especially when they back up and act as though I don't exist or am not real) and continue on without a damn hiccup. Wonderful, really."

The way he looked down at the man whose organs were suffering and on the verge of bursting beneath the invisible weight pressed against his back, perhaps he enjoyed the pain he was inflicting upon Zanz. He would be sufficiently sadistic to willingly take the souls of the dead to the Dark Realm for their final hours of retribution before being courted off to the afterlife of joy and glee with Arceus or of decay and rot and putridity with Giratina and Darkrai and all the others whose occupations had delved into the avidity of horrifying prospects of life. The insidious dispositions of those gods had been embodied throughout many of the world rulers that spread across the world, and if Yvetal was responsible for a few of those spoken about in the classes of primary school, he would not be surprised.

Zanz grimaced. "I've heard very little of you, y'know," he said, "and what I've heard is properly against you and your ways."

Yvetal nodded solemnly. "But you have heard of me, and that is what matters here and now, isn't it? Quite. And besides, my sister does not like me. She and I have lived together for close to four millennia, yet she never learned to appreciate me as a person. Who does that, man? If you're gonna treat me like absolute trash, at least do it respectfully, but _no,_ she had to do it so ostensibly that I wondered if we are even related."

"Where is she?" he asked quickly. The desperation in his voice had not abated, so it traversed the air with feeble unease.

Yvetal smiled still. Zanz could hear the voice of reason echoing through the silence of his mind to abound the man, yet he had not found the courage nor ability to even attempt such a vile revolt. So he simply looked up to Yvetal as though he were a servant gazing upon a lord's enormity from an embarrassing groveling position. "She is speaking with the man of the hour, if you should know," he revealed. He swept aside the coattails of his suit as he carefully stepped over Zanz, and the only thing he could hear was the cooing of the god of Death and the rustling of fur, the puling of the Growlithes. "Small little creatures you brought along with you to do the strength of the many. They don't look like they could carry you, much less the burden of reproducing without proper stimulation. Have you tried making the two breed yet? Or are they both male? If it's the latter, you have a problem. A major problem that should be taken care of immediately." Yvetal attempted to look underneath the Growlithes to identify their sex, floating upside down for a moment as his red eyes scanned shrewdly, but was inexorably disappointed in the futility of it, finding that the creatures backed themselves into their respective corners and whispered softly at the presence of the embodiment of decay and rot. "Damned things," he said in a tone not unfriendly.

Zanz ignored the latter comment, rather focusing on the belated answer given by the vindictive spirit. "The man of the hour?"

Yvetal reappeared in his vision in an instant, his face stretching from side to side by the breadth of his maligned smirk. "You're a shrewd man, Christopher, or you might think you are," he said enigmatically, giving him a sidelong glance that bristled his nerves. "Siphon what you will from your knowledge, and perhaps you'll find your so awaited conclusion. . . . I'll wait if you want, really."

The thoughts of the things he would do this malcontent sarcasm was abound in the small volume of Zanz's mind, and he felt it were going to expand and explode if little bouts of anger weren't released at regular intervals. He did so right now, relinquishing an exhalation that carried away a smidgen of his overarching choler. Even in his ceaseless spleen, he was able to tie together the seams which dangled in front of his face like he was a small, unintelligent toddler. Viciously, he snarled, "It's Arceus."

Yvetal snapped his fingers, twirling aimlessly in his own sardonic, characteristic weightlessness. "Bingo, little man," he congratulated. "She's having a little meeting with her favorite person in this universe. The big baddy of this operation, y'know. The creator of the expansive space we preside in now. Always he's been a very important part of her life, although I have told her again and again that she should not have believed him through every he told her. She never listens to me, probably due to the fact that she despises me, but nonetheless, I speak truths. I have facts, man, and she can't see that."

"I don't even want to listen," retorted Zanz, "or see anything that you have to show me."

Yvetal paused his whirling long enough to press his fingers to his chin and give Zanz a speculative look that processed the incoming jargon. "Oh? Well, I can show you myself, as I am now, and you would want to experience the prospect of speaking with a god. A _literal_ god," he said. "Yet you are as narrow-minded as she is, for such a smart and clever scientist that you claim to be." He scoffed. "Because that's a big ole laugh, y'know. What was it that you studied? Plants?"

"I study plants, yes," he said reluctantly. "But I'd rather you classify it as botany, if you could."

"And I'd rather you designate me as moral when you clearly think me to be immoral, so I'll just ignore what you just said except for that little snippet of confirmation." He pointed behind Zanz. "Those your plants? The freaky and queer ones that look like they got mutated by some accident caused by my pleasant little sister?" he asked.

Zanz didn't need to confirm their position to answer, "Indeed they are."

And that moment was when he realized the temperament of vengeance which infected the god of Death. The insidious smile that crossed his features fed into his epiphany.

A few seconds later, he had materialized the odd-looking stalk of a Venusian plant that owned no scientific designation as of yet, for Zanz had neglected it due to its strange and queer appearance. He called it a Venusian Flyer.

Still covered with the glassteel that held the scorching heat of Venus and its accompanying metal base and built-in alcove, its enlarged stem lifted to the sky by Xerneas's assistance, and the corroborated disc that sat atop the stalk had spread out into seven fanned petals that flowed with orange-colored chlorophyll as they curved upward, nearly meeting each other in lackadaisical synchronization. Various large leaves had emerged from the sides of the queer stem stretching unrealistically from the regolith and topsoil, flapping futilely as though it attempted flight in the frigid cargo hull. It required the condensed, intense heat which propagated the same atmosphere of Venus and the accompanying, and only an expensive mechanism supplied apprehensively by the funders of IPIS was able to regulate the temperature needed for optimum study on Zanz's part.

"Now, I assume that this little thing right here is of great importance to you, hm? It's not too significant to someone like me, y'know; material things must mean absolutely nothing to a god of the universe. All of us - Cresselia, Darkrai, Dialga, Palkia, to name a few of the ones that hate me and want nothing to do with me - must be selfless and impervious to all things that mortals crave through the unfulfilling life of abortive desires that will never come true. For true harmony, we are to serve without question, and it has been like that for hundreds of millennia, for even longer. And honestly? It's utter _garbage_ to do any of that, man. It's like havin responsibilities pressed on your shoulders like you asked for it and wanted it _all_. I shouldn't understand how it feels to own something such as this, yet I do, Christopher; I do.

"Like you," he continued, "I once attempted to be rebellious and try for myself what such desires might entail if I plucked myself a small act of selfishness from existence's edge. I began a journey that took me down a road unpaved, consisting of stray pebbles, annoying little sharp rocks that get into your feet and stab you and gravel which is rough and coarse and gets everywhere. Ugh, it was a very arduous thing, y'know, goin through all that. Yet I did it of my own accord, and by the end of it. . . . Well, you've seen what has come of it. I was once revered as a normal man that did his job until then. Do you see where selfish and thoughtless indulgence has gotten me? Do you, Christopher?"

Zanz said nothing. And this angered Yvetal. Holding the plant in one arm, he flicked his free hand downward in a single swipe. The invisible force that brought Zanz to the cool surface of the cargo hull squeezed him tighter, and he strained as the pain curled his toes and fingers to compensate for the rampant agony trailing through his veins and muscles and flesh. He moaned as his sedentary position grew more unbearable. Crushing his cheek against the metal beneath him, he lifted his eyes hesitantly upward to gaze at the gleaming dress shoes that Yvetal stylishly employed.

"You and I are one in the same, Christopher," said Yvetal smugly, leaning down to carefully meet his gaze. The plant was slipping in his hand, yet he did nothing to prevent it from falling. Luckily, it did not fall, but the the expression on his face drew dour as though he had tasted a sour berry once he peered into Zanz's anguished eyes. "Yet you are more like Xerneas than you are of me in the regards to your credulity."

" _What_?" Zanz croaked madly. It hurt to talk. His lungs constrained with the agony of thousands of kilograms being piled upon his back.

Yvetal looked away from Zanz, a wan smile guiding his lips into ironic bemusement. "Arceus ruled over her like an abounded father increasingly protective of his little girl," he said tartly. "She was always propagating the fact that she was the more respectful creation, and she stuck it in my face with her wagging finger throughout the centuries and millennia as the world you left behind began to shape from its prior evolution and natural terraforming."

Zanz said, "She's nice."

"She was not to me, to anyone else except Arceus," said Yvetal immediately. Abstract fury dwelled in his crimson irises. "Arrogant, she was. Her confidence had overtaken her very personality. She used to be pleasant, y'know."

"She is still pleasant," argued Zanz.

"But she isn't, you incompetent fool," growled Yvetal. "So long ago had treated everyone with kindness and helped all the struggling Pokémon frolicking through the undesired realm of cold winter. Then Arceus had utilized her for his own selfish purposes. He never thought us to be actual personalities, y'know, always a slave to be ordered around and commanded to do stuff. He could not whip us, yet he could abolish our freedom, like he had done for me and Xerneas for so long. So when she had been accepted by him and brought beneath his wing as his personal assistant, a superiority complex plagued her." He smacked his lips together, looking down at the man with a fiery pyre sparkling in his red eyes.

"You believe her without proper basis," he continued harshly. "You believe her without evidence. You believe her because she has told you things but has not, and presumably never will, present to you her reasons of existence. You are a scientist, self-proclaimed, disposed by your crew as a means of destroying a link that was weak and inconceivable to the thoughts of factual information, and now you wander aimlessly through space to find a planet that exists beyond a veil unbeknownst to any degree of telescope or magnifying device conceived by man."

Zanz struggled to look up. His sharp chin dug into the cool metal of the cargo hull. The combination of the two grew unbearable, yet he had no choice but to exhibit tolerance in these painstaking moments. "So - it does exist?" he asked breathlessly.

Yvetal said, "More than you and I do, Christopher. It's a world made of the same materials that Earth itself is, and it's nearly a perfect replica, although the land masses are still connected and the water is a shade different from the ones you are used to. Never visited by any creature besides the ones of Xerneas's and Arceus's joint creation. The entire thing itself is primitive, and it's not the best place to live in, really. The atmosphere is thin and barely compatible for life, and so many more agonizing factors are associated with its existence. Grueling, it must be to live there."

"Have you seen it yourself?"

Yvetal's sneered. "No, unfortunately. I wouldn't let near it even if I get myself all goody-goody with Arceus again. He refuses to allow me near the thing in the case that I might plague its entirety with death and nothing but."

"Then if death doesn't occur -"

"All the creatures in Erdenwald are immortal, yes. I wasn't let anywhere near those little asexual things because they were seen as sacrosanct and sagacious, and of course, there was no way that Xerneas couldn't provide them with the nutrients and ingredients necessary for living all right. I heard from Dialga - or maybe it was Palkia - that time there had been stagnated due to the inability to recognize whether or not someone had lived for thousands of years or merely half of one. There was no document of time, no history to be shared, no exploration to be had; the only thing practiced by those of Erdenwald were the religious sacrifices and cult-like corroboration that bespoke their beliefs in Arceus and his mighty pantheon. All was illusion except for the believed existence of the 'good' gods, with which life could not thrive without. Talk of this world has traveled far distances, as far as the galaxies you see that transcend your naked eye, and in my time before my unethical banishment, I had heard too much and too little of it simultaneously. It was perplexing, to say the least."

Zanz thought for a moment, his face curling, his small nose scrunching, his brow furrowing. Then: "How can I believe that what you have said is true?"

"Good point," said Yvetal, and there was a cheerful demeanor that overtook his face and displayed the merriment innately inconceivable to the astrobotanist. "You can't based on my word alone, although you've done the same thing with Xerneas. That's like me goin up to Dialga for some advice on dealing with my domain and believing him when he tells me, 'Oh, yeah, that was me who created space, and if I know how to control what I made, then so should you.' And yeah, it's true that my existence could be a mere projection of a psychosis you've developed in the years exposed to perilous chemicals. The same could be said for Xerneas. This could be a downward spiral you have, and you wouldn't be none the wiser. I'm a spooky ghost, bro, and I'll haunt you _forever_. You'll never be rid of me, man." Yvetal snickered to himself as he started making sounds commonly associated with Beggar's Night and the paranormal creatures correspondent of the holiday. "O-o-oh, I'm so _scary_ , aren't I?"

Zanz groaned, waiting for _all_ of this to end.

"But what I have for you is evidence, my dear man," said Yvetal after a few moments of laughter.

Blinking away, he returned with his hands empty, devoid of Zanz's prized possession. A breath of relief was released from his mouth as he watched the god of Death open his palm and, in an instant, manifested a small crimson globe covered in patches of darker red. They, harshly illuminating with a phosphorus glow, spanned wide spaces amongst the larger light red undercover. Slowly, the sphere whirled in his hand, and miniscule glowing red dots appeared upon its surface in tragic synchronization. They popped up a single second and disappeared the next, leaving a faint residue of its existence before blinking away completely. Yet it did not matter, for there was another twenty which accompanied its short life and died alongside it. For long moments, he watched as they blinked on and off, lived and died, appeared before subsequently absconding.

Hence, upon further inspection, Zanz, mesmerized by the light show appearing from the globe, promptly realized that it was the Earth. And the eclectic glows of the dots were revealed to him, in grim epiphany, to be the deaths of humans, and presumably Pokémon, too, that had lived there for years whereupon they died momentarily after a freak accident or over a long interval where the suffering was lengthened unwillingly by their loved ones. But death prevailed in the end, and they were gone in an instant.

"You know what these are, don't you, Christopher?"

Zanz gulped. He said, "Yes, I do."

"Then you must know that my employment has been replaced by another entity. Probably Zygarde has taken up the occupancy of both Xerneas and I. Bro, Zygarde himself is like a Swiss Army Knife. If you meet him, and you ask him what he does, he'll just hand you a laundry list of actions he's forced to commit to, and it's bonkers, man. But I show this" - he wagged his hand around to demonstrate his point - "to you as proof that I am who I say I am."

Hence he flicked his wrist. The visage of his homeworld shifted, malformed into another planet unbeknownst to him. The large land masses, which abound the shallow, lighter colorations upon the globe, was now prominent within his vision. And as he looked, instead of the phosphorus lights blinking their existence away, they remained, never to be dissipated. They glowed an intense red, unmoving, immobile, and soon, as the moments continued, they drew bright; so bright, in fact, that Zanz attempted to shield his eyes from the ceaseless lights that crawled underneath his eyelids and invaded his vision.

"This," said Yvetal, "is Erdenwald. Although I cannot see it with my own eyes, I can inspect it with my inherent abilities. Swarming with nasty people. Procreation by two individuals does not even exist to them, and they all look the same, only with slight variations like hair and facial features and eyes, but it's not enough, and it's not okay, not okay at all. I would be so revolted if I forced to alternate again from this planet to Earth in order to send souls to the Realm of Darkness, yet I am glad that, due to their mitosis and sagacious mannerisms, I do not have to work for them anymore."

"You really are Yvetal," said Zanz finally. The words were forced from his mouth, and he hacked and coughed as his chest compressed and strained in the intensity of his breathing.

"I am happy you do not doubt me any longer, despite _all_ the previous things I said before. Yeah, it's all cool, man, no prob." He threw his hand aside, and the globe disappeared. The small, floating dots that signified the lives of the creatures spoken about by Yvetal had remained for seconds later before they atrophied alongside their kin, their unpleasant brethren. His red eyes examined the vintage wristwatch attached to his forearm, and his eyebrows raised a smidgen. "Your friend is about done with her time with the big guy upstairs. I would get out of here and out of your hair, but I have something important to tell you."

Zanz coughed out, "Just tell me then."

Yvetal got close to his ear . . . and blew into it.

Zanz wriggled around a bit at the feeling of air in his ear, and he cursed the god of Death for his aloof demeanor.

Yvetal snickered a few times, and then in a serious tone, as though someone had smacked him in the face and reminded him that he was a god (Zanz was sure he didn't need more narcissistic fuel for his fire, though): "Don't listen to another word she says without the proper evidence. You didn't believe me until I showed you my validity; I want you to do the same thing with her, all right?"

Zanz, with great difficulty, nodded his head a mere centimeter, banging his chin across the cool surface of the metal.

"Have a great day, chap. I can't wait for another conversation with you, and I don't think I'll have to wait long, really. _Tah-tah_ ," he said in a singsong intonation. He snapped his fingers together, a loud sonorous clap slamming aggressively at his ears. A bright red sphere enveloped his entire form, and the last he saw of Yvetal that day was the enormous smirk travelling across his features.


	8. vii

The cargo hull, smaller than what was supposed to be a walk-in closet down on Earth, was cold and damp and darkened like the soul of a demon. The frigidity that accompanied farther out from the Sun wound around the shuttle and closing its fingers to imbue it with unfathomable chilliness, keeping it in its purchase at all times. The whining of Pokémon freezing beneath the conditions of the cold was a cacophony, a melodic music which resonated unreasoably against the claustrophobic metallic walls.

But as far as the spaces in the _Hubb_ went, this was the only reasonable place for momentary isolation, so he would have to settle settle. Forcing open the doors and squeezing past the broken panels which refused to allow him entrance, he sighed in exertion as he sat cross-legged between the two cages which carried his Pokémon. The male and female Growlithes, who alone made up the consensus of his fur-mottled companions, followed hungrily at the smell of roasted plant, their noses twitching and sniffing at the food he planned to eat. He transferred his gaze momentarily to the small creatures, and reached out with his free hand to pet the female's clean fur, the orange, white and yellow mixture feeding through the spaces betwixt his fingers. She purred underneath his stroking, enjoying the touch, and Zanz smiled to himself.

Slowly, he looked down at his plate, the steam which toiled noiselessly round his rosy cheeks rising from it. He had such difficulty finding a personal space that could not inflame the enormity of the Hubb, and when he did, it had been a hassle trying to set his small portable flame underneath the dish that now held his food. The whole process was a tangent that spread too long, and now as he sat, he smelled them, a exultance that filled him with succulent merriment abounding his whole body.

The overhead lights illuminated the plastic dishware, shone brightly on the assortment of vegetables and fruits that splayed athwart its surface. There was a rainbow of colors on the plate, but all of them were muted, to the point where their vibrancy no longer amazed and enthralled him. The dingy colorations they now adopted were fairly unspeakable, yet he devoured them with the aggressive desire that his stomach imposed through his synapses.

Then he saw that a small red light had illuminated the very front of the Hubb through the circular window that peered in and out of the cargo hull's interior. It had glowed a tremendous hue, a crimson so unfathomably bright that he had to cover his eyes for a brief moment. The two Growlithes seemed to have embodied his very temperament, for they looked there, too, their eyes wide with fright, their mouths agape and ready to bark and snap at an intruder if they came into view, their hind legs prepared for springing upward and striking.

Zanz had lifted himself from the cool ground, setting his vegetables aside, when he heard a shriek originating from the front of the shuttle. It had been feminine, and he automatically thought it to be Xerneas. Pushing forward and ringing his fingers around the opening of the cargo hull, he pushed the door to the right, whereupon he was thrown to the ground by the very same red light he saw hitherto. The force that struck him had ruptured his lungs and many of the organs that had taken refuge underneath his flesh, and this unbearable agony had accompanied the pain that strained through the back of his head. It slammed against the warm metal he was sitting upon earlier.

He tried movement of his legs and arms and torso, yet there was no respond from the muscles exempt of the contemptuous strain that plagued them. His head was immobile, but his eyes could still move around, their blue irises flicking about uselessly. A shred of red light had encapsulated the front of his visage. Frightened by the conception of being still as an unknown power crawled to cull him, he had attempted movement once more. Futile though it was, he still tried with all the might of a man who wished death not at all.

Alas, he remained stagnant, and the growing hue of red had approached, as scornful as its existence might be. It ran across the edge of his vision, licking at it like a hesitant Deerling lapping water from a vaguely unsafe riverbank. Then it abounded with the presence of a red-figured spirit that floated imperviously through the gravity that held down humans and animals altogether. The long, hook-nosed face of the man that looked down at him was wrought with an expression of domination. His high eyebrows dwelled over the man's sunken eyes of deep, inconceivable red. There was an apropos choler amid their placid gaze. Garbed in a suit of indistinguishable color, the transparent spirit appeared to be harboring a vindictive aura about him, but the patient smile on his face had possessed the tranquil gratitude of a man incapable of harming something as insignificant as a peaceful, innocuous Butterfree.

Still, this did not fool Zanz into acquiesce. After a few instances of perplexity pertaining to the calm, unmoving man that stood toweringly above him, the germinating confusion had abated for him to fully realize who the man was and exactly what he wanted from him.

"Yvetal," he said in a low, angry voice. His chest still garnered a pain that constricted ceaselessly around his lungs, squeezing them experimentally to test their fragility. And though he assumed his bones were strong and sturdy through the rejuvenation serums they provided him during his training back on Earth, the power of forced gravity would always rupture a man's internal organs if they had been pushed beyond their standard capabilities of pressure resistance.

His eyes had glowed a brighter red at the whisper of his name. "You know of me, then," said the god of Death with an air of jubilance and excitement. "Excellent. I can skip the whole 'I-am-the-God-of-Death' thing that I usually have to do (it's quite annoying, especially when they back up and act as though I don't exist or am not real) and continue on without a damn hiccup. Wonderful, really."

The way he looked down at the man whose organs were suffering and on the verge of bursting beneath the invisible weight pressed against his back, perhaps he enjoyed the pain he was inflicting upon Zanz. He would be sufficiently sadistic to willingly take the souls of the dead to the Dark Realm for their final hours of retribution before being courted off to the afterlife of joy and glee with Arceus or of decay and rot and putridity with Giratina and Darkrai and all the others whose occupations had delved into the avidity of horrifying prospects of life. The insidious dispositions of those gods had been embodied throughout many of the world rulers that spread across the world, and if Yvetal was responsible for a few of those spoken about in the classes of primary school, he would not be surprised.

Zanz grimaced. "I've heard very little of you, y'know," he said, "and what I've heard is properly against you and your ways."

Yvetal nodded solemnly. "But you have heard of me, and that is what matters here and now, isn't it? Quite. And besides, my sister does not like me. She and I have lived together for close to four millennia, yet she never learned to appreciate me as a person. Who does that, man? If you're gonna treat me like absolute trash, at least do it respectfully, but _no,_ she had to do it so ostensibly that I wondered if we are even related."

"Where is she?" he asked quickly. The desperation in his voice had not abated, so it traversed the air with feeble unease.

Yvetal smiled still. Zanz could hear the voice of reason echoing through the silence of his mind to abound the man, yet he had not found the courage nor ability to even attempt such a vile revolt. So he simply looked up to Yvetal as though he were a servant gazing upon a lord's enormity from an embarrassing groveling position. "She is speaking with the man of the hour, if you should know," he revealed. He swept aside the coattails of his suit as he carefully stepped over Zanz, and the only thing he could hear was the cooing of the god of Death and the rustling of fur, the puling of the Growlithes. "Small little creatures you brought along with you to do the strength of the many. They don't look like they could carry you, much less the burden of reproducing without proper stimulation. Have you tried making the two breed yet? Or are they both male? If it's the latter, you have a problem. A major problem that should be taken care of immediately." Yvetal attempted to look underneath the Growlithes to identify their sex, floating upside down for a moment as his red eyes scanned shrewdly, but was inexorably disappointed in the futility of it, finding that the creatures backed themselves into their respective corners and whispered softly at the presence of the embodiment of decay and rot. "Damned things," he said in a tone not unfriendly.

Zanz ignored the latter comment, rather focusing on the belated answer given by the vindictive spirit. "The man of the hour?"

Yvetal reappeared in his vision in an instant, his face stretching from side to side by the breadth of his maligned smirk. "You're a shrewd man, Christopher, or you might think you are," he said enigmatically, giving him a sidelong glance that bristled his nerves. "Siphon what you will from your knowledge, and perhaps you'll find your so awaited conclusion. . . . I'll wait if you want, really."

The thoughts of the things he would do this malcontent sarcasm was abound in the small volume of Zanz's mind, and he felt it were going to expand and explode if little bouts of anger weren't released at regular intervals. He did so right now, relinquishing an exhalation that carried away a smidgen of his overarching choler. Even in his ceaseless spleen, he was able to tie together the seams which dangled in front of his face like he was a small, unintelligent toddler. Viciously, he snarled, "It's Arceus."

Yvetal snapped his fingers, twirling aimlessly in his own sardonic, characteristic weightlessness. "Bingo, little man," he congratulated. "She's having a little meeting with her favorite person in this universe. The big baddy of this operation, y'know. The creator of the expansive space we preside in now. Always he's been a very important part of her life, although I have told her again and again that she should not have believed him through every he told her. She never listens to me, probably due to the fact that she despises me, but nonetheless, I speak truths. I have facts, man, and she can't see that."

"I don't even want to listen," retorted Zanz, "or see anything that you have to show me."

Yvetal paused his whirling long enough to press his fingers to his chin and give Zanz a speculative look that processed the incoming jargon. "Oh? Well, I can show you myself, as I am now, and you would want to experience the prospect of speaking with a god. A _literal_ god," he said. "Yet you are as narrow-minded as she is, for such a smart and clever scientist that you claim to be." He scoffed. "Because that's a big ole laugh, y'know. What was it that you studied? Plants?"

"I study plants, yes," he said reluctantly. "But I'd rather you classify it as botany, if you could."

"And I'd rather you designate me as moral when you clearly think me to be immoral, so I'll just ignore what you just said except for that little snippet of confirmation." He pointed behind Zanz. "Those your plants? The freaky and queer ones that look like they got mutated by some accident caused by my pleasant little sister?" he asked.

Zanz didn't need to confirm their position to answer, "Indeed they are."

And that moment was when he realized the temperament of vengeance which infected the god of Death. The insidious smile that crossed his features fed into his epiphany.

A few seconds later, he had materialized the odd-looking stalk of a Venusian plant that owned no scientific designation as of yet, for Zanz had neglected it due to its strange and queer appearance. He called it a Venusian Flyer.

Still covered with the glassteel that held the scorching heat of Venus and its accompanying metal base and built-in alcove, its enlarged stem lifted to the sky by Xerneas's assistance, and the corroborated disc that sat atop the stalk had spread out into seven fanned petals that flowed with orange-colored chlorophyll as they curved upward, nearly meeting each other in lackadaisical synchronization. Various large leaves had emerged from the sides of the queer stem stretching unrealistically from the regolith and topsoil, flapping futilely as though it attempted flight in the frigid cargo hull. It required the condensed, intense heat which propagated the same atmosphere of Venus and the accompanying, and only an expensive mechanism supplied apprehensively by the funders of IPIS was able to regulate the temperature needed for optimum study on Zanz's part.

"Now, I assume that this little thing right here is of great importance to you, hm? It's not too significant to someone like me, y'know; material things must mean absolutely nothing to a god of the universe. All of us - Cresselia, Darkrai, Dialga, Palkia, to name a few of the ones that hate me and want nothing to do with me - must be selfless and impervious to all things that mortals crave through the unfulfilling life of abortive desires that will never come true. For true harmony, we are to serve without question, and it has been like that for hundreds of millennia, for even longer. And honestly? It's utter _garbage_ to do any of that, man. It's like havin responsibilities pressed on your shoulders like you asked for it and wanted it _all_. I shouldn't understand how it feels to own something such as this, yet I do, Christopher; I do.

"Like you," he continued, "I once attempted to be rebellious and try for myself what such desires might entail if I plucked myself a small act of selfishness from existence's edge. I began a journey that took me down a road unpaved, consisting of stray pebbles, annoying little sharp rocks that get into your feet and stab you and gravel which is rough and coarse and gets everywhere. Ugh, it was a very arduous thing, y'know, goin through all that. Yet I did it of my own accord, and by the end of it. . . . Well, you've seen what has come of it. I was once revered as a normal man that did his job until then. Do you see where selfish and thoughtless indulgence has gotten me? Do you, Christopher?"

Zanz said nothing. And this angered Yvetal. Holding the plant in one arm, he flicked his free hand downward in a single swipe. The invisible force that brought Zanz to the cool surface of the cargo hull squeezed him tighter, and he strained as the pain curled his toes and fingers to compensate for the rampant agony trailing through his veins and muscles and flesh. He moaned as his sedentary position grew more unbearable. Crushing his cheek against the metal beneath him, he lifted his eyes hesitantly upward to gaze at the gleaming dress shoes that Yvetal stylishly employed.

"You and I are one in the same, Christopher," said Yvetal smugly, leaning down to carefully meet his gaze. The plant was slipping in his hand, yet he did nothing to prevent it from falling. Luckily, it did not fall, but the the expression on his face drew dour as though he had tasted a sour berry once he peered into Zanz's anguished eyes. "Yet you are more like Xerneas than you are of me in the regards to your credulity."

" _What_?" Zanz croaked madly. It hurt to talk. His lungs constrained with the agony of thousands of kilograms being piled upon his back.

Yvetal looked away from Zanz, a wan smile guiding his lips into ironic bemusement. "Arceus ruled over her like an abounded father increasingly protective of his little girl," he said tartly. "She was always propagating the fact that she was the more respectful creation, and she stuck it in my face with her wagging finger throughout the centuries and millennia as the world you left behind began to shape from its prior evolution and natural terraforming."

Zanz said, "She's nice."

"She was not to me, to anyone else except Arceus," said Yvetal immediately. Abstract fury dwelled in his crimson irises. "Arrogant, she was. Her confidence had overtaken her very personality. She used to be pleasant, y'know."

"She is still pleasant," argued Zanz.

"But she isn't, you incompetent fool," growled Yvetal. "So long ago had treated everyone with kindness and helped all the struggling Pokémon frolicking through the undesired realm of cold winter. Then Arceus had utilized her for his own selfish purposes. He never thought us to be actual personalities, y'know, always a slave to be ordered around and commanded to do stuff. He could not whip us, yet he could abolish our freedom, like he had done for me and Xerneas for so long. So when she had been accepted by him and brought beneath his wing as his personal assistant, a superiority complex plagued her." He smacked his lips together, looking down at the man with a fiery pyre sparkling in his red eyes.

"You believe her without proper basis," he continued harshly. "You believe her without evidence. You believe her because she has told you things but has not, and presumably never will, present to you her reasons of existence. You are a scientist, self-proclaimed, disposed by your crew as a means of destroying a link that was weak and inconceivable to the thoughts of factual information, and now you wander aimlessly through space to find a planet that exists beyond a veil unbeknownst to any degree of telescope or magnifying device conceived by man."

Zanz struggled to look up. His sharp chin dug into the cool metal of the cargo hull. The combination of the two grew unbearable, yet he had no choice but to exhibit tolerance in these painstaking moments. "So - it does exist?" he asked breathlessly.

Yvetal said, "More than you and I do, Christopher. It's a world made of the same materials that Earth itself is, and it's nearly a perfect replica, although the land masses are still connected and the water is a shade different from the ones you are used to. Never visited by any creature besides the ones of Xerneas's and Arceus's joint creation. The entire thing itself is primitive, and it's not the best place to live in, really. The atmosphere is thin and barely compatible for life, and so many more agonizing factors are associated with its existence. Grueling, it must be to live there."

"Have you seen it yourself?"

Yvetal's sneered. "No, unfortunately. I wouldn't let near it even if I get myself all goody-goody with Arceus again. He refuses to allow me near the thing in the case that I might plague its entirety with death and nothing but."

"Then if death doesn't occur -"

"All the creatures in Erdenwald are immortal, yes. I wasn't let anywhere near those little asexual things because they were seen as sacrosanct and sagacious, and of course, there was no way that Xerneas couldn't provide them with the nutrients and ingredients necessary for living all right. I heard from Dialga - or maybe it was Palkia - that time there had been stagnated due to the inability to recognize whether or not someone had lived for thousands of years or merely half of one. There was no document of time, no history to be shared, no exploration to be had; the only thing practiced by those of Erdenwald were the religious sacrifices and cult-like corroboration that bespoke their beliefs in Arceus and his mighty pantheon. All was illusion except for the believed existence of the 'good' gods, with which life could not thrive without. Talk of this world has traveled far distances, as far as the galaxies you see that transcend your naked eye, and in my time before my unethical banishment, I had heard too much and too little of it simultaneously. It was perplexing, to say the least."

Zanz thought for a moment, his face curling, his small nose scrunching, his brow furrowing. Then: "How can I believe that what you have said is true?"

"Good point," said Yvetal, and there was a cheerful demeanor that overtook his face and displayed the merriment innately inconceivable to the astrobotanist. "You can't based on my word alone, although you've done the same thing with Xerneas. That's like me goin up to Dialga for some advice on dealing with my domain and believing him when he tells me, 'Oh, yeah, that was me who created space, and if I know how to control what I made, then so should you.' And yeah, it's true that my existence could be a mere projection of a psychosis you've developed in the years exposed to perilous chemicals. The same could be said for Xerneas. This could be a downward spiral you have, and you wouldn't be none the wiser. I'm a spooky ghost, bro, and I'll haunt you _forever_. You'll never be rid of me, man." Yvetal snickered to himself as he started making sounds commonly associated with Beggar's Night and the paranormal creatures correspondent of the holiday. "O-o-oh, I'm so _scary_ , aren't I?"

Zanz groaned, waiting for _all_ of this to end.

"But what I have for you is evidence, my dear man," said Yvetal after a few moments of laughter.

Blinking away, he returned with his hands empty, devoid of Zanz's prized possession. A breath of relief was released from his mouth as he watched the god of Death open his palm and, in an instant, manifested a small crimson globe covered in patches of darker red. They, harshly illuminating with a phosphorus glow, spanned wide spaces amongst the larger light red undercover. Slowly, the sphere whirled in his hand, and miniscule glowing red dots appeared upon its surface in tragic synchronization. They popped up a single second and disappeared the next, leaving a faint residue of its existence before blinking away completely. Yet it did not matter, for there was another twenty which accompanied its short life and died alongside it. For long moments, he watched as they blinked on and off, lived and died, appeared before subsequently absconding.

Hence, upon further inspection, Zanz, mesmerized by the light show appearing from the globe, promptly realized that it was the Earth. And the eclectic glows of the dots were revealed to him, in grim epiphany, to be the deaths of humans, and presumably Pokémon, too, that had lived there for years whereupon they died momentarily after a freak accident or over a long interval where the suffering was lengthened unwillingly by their loved ones. But death prevailed in the end, and they were gone in an instant.

"You know what these are, don't you, Christopher?"

Zanz gulped. He said, "Yes, I do."

"Then you must know that my employment has been replaced by another entity. Probably Zygarde has taken up the occupancy of both Xerneas and I. Bro, Zygarde himself is like a Swiss Army Knife. If you meet him, and you ask him what he does, he'll just hand you a laundry list of actions he's forced to commit to, and it's bonkers, man. But I show this" - he wagged his hand around to demonstrate his point - "to you as proof that I am who I say I am."

Hence he flicked his wrist. The visage of his homeworld shifted, malformed into another planet unbeknownst to him. The large land masses, which abound the shallow, lighter colorations upon the globe, was now prominent within his vision. And as he looked, instead of the phosphorus lights blinking their existence away, they remained, never to be dissipated. They glowed an intense red, unmoving, immobile, and soon, as the moments continued, they drew bright; so bright, in fact, that Zanz attempted to shield his eyes from the ceaseless lights that crawled underneath his eyelids and invaded his vision.

"This," said Yvetal, "is Erdenwald. Although I cannot see it with my own eyes, I can inspect it with my inherent abilities. Swarming with nasty people. Procreation by two individuals does not even exist to them, and they all look the same, only with slight variations like hair and facial features and eyes, but it's not enough, and it's not okay, not okay at all. I would be so revolted if I forced to alternate again from this planet to Earth in order to send souls to the Realm of Darkness, yet I am glad that, due to their mitosis and sagacious mannerisms, I do not have to work for them anymore."

"You really are Yvetal," said Zanz finally. The words were forced from his mouth, and he hacked and coughed as his chest compressed and strained in the intensity of his breathing.

"I am happy you do not doubt me any longer, despite _all_ the previous things I said before. Yeah, it's all cool, man, no prob." He threw his hand aside, and the globe disappeared. The small, floating dots that signified the lives of the creatures spoken about by Yvetal had remained for seconds later before they atrophied alongside their kin, their unpleasant brethren. His red eyes examined the vintage wristwatch attached to his forearm, and his eyebrows raised a smidgen. "Your friend is about done with her time with the big guy upstairs. I would get out of here and out of your hair, but I have something important to tell you."

Zanz coughed out, "Just tell me then."

Yvetal got close to his ear . . . and blew into it.

Zanz wriggled around a bit at the feeling of air in his ear, and he cursed the god of Death for his aloof demeanor.

Yvetal snickered a few times, and then in a serious tone, as though someone had smacked him in the face and reminded him that he was a god (Zanz was sure he didn't need more narcissistic fuel for his fire, though): "Don't listen to another word she says without the proper evidence. You didn't believe me until I showed you my validity; I want you to do the same thing with her, all right?"

Zanz, with great difficulty, nodded his head a mere centimeter, banging his chin across the cool surface of the metal.

"Have a great day, chap. I can't wait for another conversation with you, and I don't think I'll have to wait long, really. _Tah-tah_ ," he said in a singsong intonation. He snapped his fingers together, a loud sonorous clap slamming aggressively at his ears. A bright red sphere enveloped his entire form, and the last he saw of Yvetal that day was the enormous smirk travelling across his features.


	9. viii

Xerneas crawled forward and placed her hands upon his shoulders. A chill ran down his spine, but he was inured to the gentle touch of the goddess, so he remained unfazed by the frigidity spiraling down to his pelvis. His hands were clenched at the manual controls, for the shuttle was experiencing unwarranted shuddering, and he was attempting to rectify the gesticulations by his own right.

"Xerneas," he greeted peacefully, looking through the glassteel into the space within which he could see Saturn and its dusty, rocky rings at the far right of his visage. Behind him, spinning slowly on its axis, was the gas giant Jupiter, and he had passed it with the assistance of an exertion exuded by Xerneas's innate abilities. Near collision occurred with one of its closest moons, Io, as they slowly yet resolutely approached; it was averted by the speedy mitigation of Xerneas's control. This did not deter their adventure onward, though, and they continued nevertheless. The lightspeed at which they travelled divulged an avocation of Zanz's: his love of looking through the stars and discovering small constellations never before seen by the dwellers of Earth.

"Christopher, how have you been treating these Pokémon?" she asked.

"The ones in the back, y'mean?" He gave her an odd look. "I've been feeding them the diet I eat, and supplying them with the transient water I've been crafting chemically. Why?"

"They have been moaning and groaning for long periods of time as though they haven't been fed or given anything to drink for eons," she said.

"That's not good. I only resupplied them yesterday. Are you sure?"

"Positive," she replied matter-of-factly.

"Huh." He unfastened himself from the chair, depressing the button and allowing the elastic belt to snap back into its initial position. Xerneas appeared at his side with dire, remorseful eyes as he strode forward to settle the matter.

As scornful as the savages back on the Satoshi might have been to the Pokémon that shipped through the galaxy to different planets just to see how they'd react in the unknown environments, he cared for the life they supplied him, yet was unable to make a difference. Whilst he was aboard the Satoshi, he could do nothing to relegate the conditions of living they succumb to, thus leaving it as is without consulting the authorities of inhumane acts of violence and neglect upon the Pokémon.

But to them, they were tools. To him, their biology, and mere existence on Earth, perhaps even in the caverns and ravines and valleys of the unventured planets farther or closer to the Sun, was a fascinating piece of science and anatomy, indifferent to the germination of humans and their eventual development into congnitive intelligence, and learning through the basics of a Pokémon genetic structure and how one might be created was a standard course in primary school. College even supplied the astrobiologists of his time a course on discovering new species within the confines of space.

The studies branching from the existence of Pokémon themselves was expansive so far, and the prolific writings of Oak and Hawthorne and Juniper were known across the lands as science fact, taught to the children, teenagers and adults who wished to know more about the subject. He was well acquainted with such works, and if it weren't for his ceaseless persistence to divulge his intelligence within the petals of innocuous plants, he would have thought himself amongst their ranks as a Pokémon biologist, although his bibliography would be a trifle scarce compared to their mountainous volumes.

Insofar, the production of artificial Pokémon had increased tenfold from their previous means of craftsmanship, and whilst the elusive Mewtwo still roamed the universe looking for the duplicates it modestly conceived during its rebellion in the face of Arceus himself, there wasn't a sparse amount of synthetic authenticity within the factories mass-producing the strange creatures without consulting the secular, natural ways in which Pokémon evolved from their primitive ways to their current incarnations. Zanz hated this, and before he had consigned his appointment at IPIS to the Satoshi's voyage through space, he planned to expose its insanity once and for all. The people would see the axioms he would document in his manuscript; nothing else would be the same.

Alas, here he was, linking his fingers into the crevice that opened the door and pushing to the right to get it far from his face. The cargo hull did not smell rancid or unsanitary stench that he might have aboard the Satoshi, yet he saw that the two caged Growlithes, male and female respectively, refused to eat the food or drink the water which had been put there only a day ago. They peered through the lustrous bars at him, their brown eyes glistening with unbidden tears. Their mottled fur was unjustifiably unruly, and he would have to fix that whenever he had the chance.

Yet the problem still remained: they refused to eat the food or drink the water. Their paws padded perilously close to the rear of the cubic cages, growling and barking lowly at the food and water angrily.

But why were they frightened of it? he thought. Why wouldn't someone drink or eat something in the fear that it might harm them?

Then he had an idea.

"Xerneas, could you please retrieve one of the wristbands from the main controls and bring it back to me?" he asked. Then, pleadingly: "Please: their survival relies on it."

She returned not even a minute later with the device, and strapping it to his wrist and readjusting its settings to accommodate his commanding presence, he pressed a series of unseen buttons. Then he thrust his hand forward, hovering over the food bowl of the female Growlithe. The scanners which ran through its wirework had done its job within seconds, the clicking and whirring finishing up to broadcast on the display interface, and he produced the results to Xerneas with a mild smile of accomplishment wrought on his face.

"Yep," he said, his voice a juxtaposed mix of haplessness and merriment. "They're poisoned. Imbued with cyanide, it seems."

"Now who would be on this ship except us?" she asked ponderously. The wrinkles that appeared to crease and fold on each other flowing athwart her forward demonstrated thoughtful thinking, and she contemplated thoroughly, sifting through the plausible possibilities.

"No one," he responded, and even as he said it, he knew it was doubtful. "And I know I didn't do anything to the food or the water. There would be no way that could happen."

"And I know I didn't, either," she said firmly. But her pursed lips and tightening visage bade a suspicion that broiled inside her mind.

"What're you thinkin?" he inquired.

Several moments of contemplation occurred. The ponderous expression which dawned their faces disappeared off hers in mere seconds, and he raised an eyebrow at her.

"It could be another god, y'know," she said.

Leaning against the cool metal of the cage. She reached down and wagged her finger in front of the bars, and laughed humorlessly as the male Growlithe licked at her transparent nails, feeling nothing but an ice-cold sensation running up his tongue. It backed away, whereupon she slipped her hand through the bars and flickered her placid fingers to the food, replenishing the vitality of the contaminated food and water. He moved Zanz aside to do the same with the female's supply.

"Y'mean. . . ." Zanz's eyes lit up with recognition. "Yvetal?"

She somberly nodded.

Zanz asked, "But why would he want to sabotage the Pokémon? There would have to be a proper reason why he would even want to do anything like this."

"Perhaps he is lashing out on anything he can get his hands on. He is very angry at the world, y'know, me and Arceus especially," she said. "But you are his host, and he cannot do anything in response to hurt you, for if he did succeed and you fell ill to the point of death, he and I would disappear from your conscience, trapped once more in the Rock of Enigmas for some other cosmonaut to find us and send us to Erdenwald."

"You need me, then."

"Or we are sent back to that mysterious rock, yes."

A spark of mirth flickered in his chest. He said, "Cool." Then, his face contorting: "But does that mean he's here on the shuttle, then?"

"Well, yes. Assuming that you and I are connected because of your interaction with the Rock of Enigmas, it can be insinuated that he, too, has impeded your conscience without your knowing. He and I were stuck in there together, mind you, and if one were to be relinquished, then the other would follow. He may have slowly started affecting different aspects of this very venture, making you fail instead of succeed. He exudes a red aura which diseases almost everything that comes near it. He could have gotten to the cages and infected the food and water with the touch of Death. It's not too implausible."

"It's not," he agreed.

The cycle of problems occurring on the Hubb was circuitous, engendered by the god of Death himself due to his jealousy, envy, and choler circulating within the depths of his mind. If he were cognizant of the personal drives of Yvetal, he may have been able to derive meaning from the attacks on the shuttle and the Pokémon directly, but coalescence was impossible with the god's ethereal mind and his own tangible brain. Therefore there was no way he could confirm the fact that Yvetal had generated the constant, unchanging shaking of the Hubb which caused his manual control to be the unfortunate norm, yet there was a rising superstition that this was the inexorable truth. It was a pittance compared to the immensity of their rueful reality, but he believed it nonetheless.

"We must keep an eye out for him," she said then, ripping him his torpor.

"And what will happen when we find him?"

Her face was indiscernible. "We will attempt to vanquish him," she said, the amenity in her voice scarcely translating through her low, succulent intonation.

"How will we go about that? Isn't he the god of Death? Can't he plague me immediately if he wished?"

Her face was obfuscated with a tense mask which displayed nothing of emotional attachment to her brother except sparse contempt. "We will burn that bridge when we cross it," she said, the adage slipping from her lips without procedure, and retreated from the cargo hull after petting each Growlithe a single time. Her blue-eyed glance grazed his own as she passed silently, and he deprived himself of the chill that inadvertently traversed down his back, keeping his comport regulated and emotionless.

His back craned upward, the force which held it down suddenly diffusing itself from the ramparts and edifices of his back and its affiliated spine. His lungs, prior constrained by the compressions to the cool metal underneath him, had received air normally again, and he breathed regularly for a moment as he lie there in virtual silence. The Growlithes to his sides were whimpering and puling, but he paid no attention to them, more focused on the fact that, although he was sure death was upon him at the sight of the god who controlled such a domain, he was still alive despite all odds and circumstances that would've informed him of otherwise.

The isolation that accompanied the next few moments wherein he sat himself up and assisted his sitting position by the cages holding the Growlithes was silent and unobtrusive. The quiet disconcerted him, a grotesque shroud of absent sound that blanketed his existence, and he said a few thoughtless words to break the quiet, to dissuade himself from the growing fear which fed affluent dread within his soul.

His conversation with Yvetal, he thought in circumspection, was slightly uncanny. The queerness with which he spoke filled him with uncertainty, but the projection displayed by his own abilities convinced him, if only partly, that he wasn't being erroneous. Being willingly ignorant and trustworthy of someone without question or query was the mark of a man incompetent. Zanz himself had not thought himself to be so, yet he was enlightened by the mere mentioning of his own misdeeds, and now, as he ponderously gave the consideration thought, it inflated to immense proportions. He couldn't think of anything else, and so many notions spiraled and swirled nonchalantly through the rampant lands of his conscience. The questions, too, piled in without proper authorization.

Was Xerneas actually telling him the truth about how Yvetal had punished the both of them? Was Yvetal truly a man of distaste and vengeance? Was Xerneas herself a product of selfishness and jealousy? Did she have intentions beyond regaining control of herself when she got to Erdenwald? Would she kill him when they got to Erdenwald as to dispose of an eyewitness?

All of them, conceived simultaneously by hidden, innate thoughts uncovered by the an enlightenment engendered by Yvetal, zoomed so fast that he was barely able to comprehend them, but as soon as he held them and considered them, the more cautious and insecure he grew. The germination developing ceaselessly in his bile had grown to forewarn him of anything that might appear from the inquiries at the forefront of his mind, and he winced and cringed towards his plants the more nervous he became. A plethora shattering notions had crashed noisily into his head, so he held his temples with clenching fingers that curled around his long hair, pressing his palms into the sides of his cranium, digging deep, sifting sonorously.

A wave of exhaustion fell over him as the thoughts abated but did not ebb utterly away. They still stagnated whilst he closed his eyes for a moment, looking out from the slits of his eyelids where his irises, dim and blue, could not look out farther than a few hazy centimeters. The torrent was subsequently followed by him thinking, I can't stay up any longer to wait for Xerneas. . . . There's no way I'll be able to even sit up in a few minutes. I'll just rest my eyes and she can wake me up when she gets back. Besides . . . it'll just be a little nap. Yeah, a little nap. It won't be too long.

Drowsily, he said to the male Growlithe lying on his back with his rugged tongue out and his furry legs aloft: "Don't wake me up until Xer gets here, okay? I need . . . I need some time to think. And sleep. More of the latter than the . . . the other one."

He slept to the sound of puling for the night.

And when Xerneas finally returned from wherever she may've been, she hadn't thought to disturb the man from his slumber. He was resting so peacefully, the tranquil air about him a quiet, unobtrusive demonstration, and he looked as though he would be rather hostile if he were to be awakened, so she just simply left him there in the cargo hold. He would wake up soon, she knew. Then he would be ready to talk, and she surely needed to speak to him, especially after this revelation was placed uncharacteristically upon her dainty, petite shoulders.

I'll keep it for another day, she thought. He won't be mad just yet. . . .


	10. ix

Zanz sat at the controls of the _Hubb_. Beyond his visage, the vacuum of space that expanded infinitely shone bright in his face, and it illuminated the grave creases and the solemn lines that acted as sharp edifices and deep ramparts of a bluff that rose high above skyscrapers from Earth. It was a pale white, his face, and the façade that he administered before had already broken. His artificial aloofness, that of which he had adorned for days, weeks after his conversation with the elusive god of Death, was suddenly swept away by a torrent of enlightenment, and Yvetal, although Zanz himself could not see the grinning face of the dark-skinned man in front of him, would be proud of himself if he saw the corrupt transformation that inhabited the astrobotanist's body.

"I spoke to someone."

His voice carried to the other end of the Hubb, where Xerneas laid nonchalantly, taking light breaths to emulate the needs of a human. At the statement, she turned to him. Her blue eyes had gone dim for a moment. "Who?" she asked lowly. Her voice, too, dimmed significantly.

"Your brother."

And a flame was burst in the depths of her irises. A contrast blasted from them. "You _what_?" she nearly shrieked. The Hubb itself shook with anger.

The choler, however, affected Zanz no more than the rigidity of the faux fabric chair had been for so long. He kept himself composed, and said, "I have, and -"

Xerneas's aura, so peaceful and tranquil though it might've been hitherto, chilled and froze the small area around her. Miniscule frost gathered on the surface of the metal. The atmosphere filled with coolness, shuddering the hull with a shaking that engendered minor turbulence. The cold spleen had flamed through her eyes, and her footsteps were palpable against the metal underfoot as she crept up from behind him. He could tell her face was only centimeters from his own, but he was seemingly unable to turn to the left to see the pyres in her eyes. He knew that they glowed egregiously, for in the reflection that held the visage to the exterior revealed her muted yet infuriated form to him.

She said slowly, emphasizing her words to articulate the grievance in her voice, "What did he say to you?"

Zanz took a deep breath. She won't kill me, he thought. I am important to the mission, and she won't kill me for telling the truth. He paused for a moment, thinking, contemplating his options. Then: "First, answer this question."

Although she was far from dissuading herself from the entity of madness controlling her, it abated for a second. "All right," she said reasonably. "What is it, then? Something of Arceus? Something of myself?"

Zanz shook his head. The tighter he gripped the controls, the whiter his knuckles became, and now, he noticed absently, speckles with small dots of reddish skin were mixed into the peaceful pools of white that gathered at the bases of his fingers. "What will happen when we touch land on Erdenwald?" he asked.

Xerneas frowned. "We will locate the Palace of Arceus," she said quickly.

"Then?" he prompted.

"Then you'll be able to do whatever it is you do with your plants and your sciences. I will deal with the people of Erdenwald on my own, and if I need your assistance, I will have you at my side, helping."

Zanz said, "I think not."

Her frown dug deeper into the crevices of her cheeks. "You cannot say that," she argued.

"I need to return to my crew, the _Satoshi,_ my work, everything that I am," he said disagreeably. "I cannot stay on Erdenwald as though I am a servant to you."

The accusatory disposition of his intonation aggravated her once more, and her eyes flared once more. "You will not be a servant," she said grossly. "Arceus has had you come with me to Erdenwald as a prophet."

" _A prophet?"_

"Yes."

"I am a scientist, Xerneas. I cannot go about the planet as a damn _prophet_! It's not my place!"

"Arceus says so, Christopher. And his word is law. I can't go against what he says. He'll lock me up again, and probably with Yvetal, too." The frown had dug to bedrock now, and its irreversible awareness of the situation and its dire requirements had settled into the ramparts of her nearly flawless face. "He cannot rule without subjects, and Erdenwald itself is a product of our own creation."

"But I need to return to my original work. I did not mean to summon you, y'know. I found you out, and your brother, too, because of Margaret's incessant badgering. If anything, you should've made her do the deeds of whatever you wish for me to do."

"But you will have so many plants there. You can contact the Satoshi through the communication systems in here, and development for a new base there on Erdenwald could be initiated. I can get everything you need, Christopher; there would be no need to leave Erdenwald for anything."

"And who told you that?" snapped Zanz.

"Arceus!" she screamed. The sound had shattered his hearing, and he had gone deaf for a few moments before his hearing came to. She hadn't spoken till then, so she said in a soft, almost timid, "He told me that you needed to be there. I left you to talk to him and he told me that he needed you. He needed someone that could serve as a prophet, someone who might be able to present to the world the words of his own lordship without direct divine intervention."

Zanz let his hands release from the controls of the Hubb, and he jammed the autopilot as soon as the hull shuddered momentarily. It readjusted itself, its pulsating thrusters edging out the shakes it experienced beforehand. Then he snapped off the safety harness which kept him from flying from the seat and into the depths of space. Pivoting on his heel, he faced the dainty goddess of Life. His height hadn't been as sufficient enough to grant him the designation of tall in the presence of his crew, but now, as he peered down at the woman with the weird, glowing antlers peeking through her strands of hair, he could think to himself that he was finally a towering entity.

The coalescing anxiety that broiled in his stomach for mere weeks since his talk with Yvetal and his incessant questioning had bubbled up through his throat, and he said, "I cannot do that. I only came to get my plants and leave with them, y'know. I didn't want all this. I didn't want to be initiated into a distant religion I have no terms or conditions I have to uphold. You forced me into this, and now you want me to stay? No, there's no way, Xerneas."

"But there has to be, Christopher," she argued. "Remember, those people on Erdenwald require a prophet. With Arceus locking us away, the planet was lost to me, and he ignore it for centuries. He never wanted anything to do with if after I was thought to be a treason-committing heathen, but now, he's given me a choice."

Zanz's face curled grotesquely. "A choice? What choice?" he shouted.

She turned away from him. Now there were small crystalline tears dripping down her cold, icy cheeks, and sobs racked her spine, shaking it tremulously. Seldom had she shown such emotional weakness previously, and Zanz, unemotional as he tended to be, had his heartstrings plucked with the fingers of guilt and remorse playing the song of apologies within the interior of his chest, ringing loudly amongst his whole body.

"What choice?" he repeated again, softer this time.

"I can't say. I promised not to say," she whispered, her hushed voice almost dissipating in the heavy breaths coiling from Zanz's mouth.

"Say it!"

"I can't, Christopher, I just can't!" She took a deep breath, chest heaving, tears falling down her cheeks, blue rivers running along those flawless edifices. She continued tremulously: "It would be a transgression, and I'd get trapped again! Do you want that? Do you want me to be gone for millennia after being there with him for so long?"

"You want me to abandon my entire career for something I don't want to do!" retorted Zanz. His pale face was painted with an angry red. "You're imploring me to condemn myself to a solitude I'm unwillingly to lapse! Now tell me, or so I swear, I will take myself into space and kill myself to banish you to your rock once more."

She gave him a sidelong glance. The melancholy and grievances were hard to distinguish within her irises, but the flames there still burned considerably, ceaselessly, although they very slowly dimmed. "You wouldn't dare," she sniffled.

He stepped daringly to the hatch doorway that led into the mysterious unknown of velvet and light. She stood there in the quiet silence, watching him as his finger closed in nearer to the release switch, and Yvetal's voice, the suave, convincing intonation he heard weeks ago, had entered the back of his head. Smoothly, it said, "Christopher, just do it. She'll crack. Remember, she hates being with me, and she'll do anything to prevent that. C'mon, just do it."

And although Zanz had no idea whether or not this was a plan that would go down in the ages as something to laud, he had decided that he'd no other option, since she was scared of losing him, her only connection to the source of power she so easily craved. Stepping closer, it was just enough to tap the release switch. The hatch swung open easily, the mechanisms working fast at the press of a button, and he had flown right into the vacuum of space as it dragged almost everything that was strapped down through the small doorway leading into the abyss bleak and dark outside. Drifting, he was now. In a nanosuit, it was fun floating around aimlessly through the gravity-devoid vacuum. But left barren and without life support? Eh, not so much.

Almost immediately, he could feel the air escaping his lungs and them not filling up again. The constrictions on his chest had inclined within a moment, and he grasped instinctively at his throat as he saw that the Hubb had drawn away a few meters, and that death was on the way if nothing was done about the situation. There was blinding chill that suddenly erupted around him, and the frigidity was instantaneous, bringing upon the coolness of temperatures way below zero. His breath came not. This impasse is grueling, he thought, and he assumed those to be his last notions before he was abound by the blanket that shrouded all those who left the universe in an unceremonious way. Presumably, he'd join all of them, too, for listening to such a stupid thing and believing that it would work. He only had moments before death. The oxygen left his brain, and he felt his eyelids topple upon his dimmed blue eyes, sinking like the boats capsized in the wake of torrents strong and massive. . . .

Then he felt his lungs fill so suddenly with air that he gasped and choked and nearly had a panic attack seize his body and draw him further into the realm of madness he was walking towards. He blinked several times, perplexed as he felt himself being pushed backwards to the off-course Hubb, and his visage soon revealed to him that a small bubble had conspired around the thinness of his head, blue in hue and pushing sweet oxygen into his lungs.

Sweeping through the expanse of the universe with nothing but a bubble wrapped over his head, he had looked around to see that Jupiter was far off to his right whilst Saturn was coming nearer to his left. Its bands and rings of asteroids and minerals and dust had spun around like a swirling mixer, and he watched at the rotating rocks had followed the currents of space around the large gas giant. He was sure that no one would ever land in the core of the planet, even with technology advanced beyond his comprehension. It was too unbearable to conceive that a manned mission could be completed on such a far away planet since even in today's age, it was almost impossible for Mars to be colonized by the minor amount of people living there in the domed, interconnected bubbles that served as small towns and cities spread athwart the iron-rust red planet itself. It had happened, thanks to science, but completing this again on Mercury was a hassle in itself, especially with all the attempts to regulate temperature to adhere to the ideal human requirements. And to utterly dispose of expensive equipment and men upon something fruitless and futile was inane and stupid.

Mesmerized by the mere immensity of Saturn and his accompanying reverie, he didn't know that he was coming in hot to the Hubb's hatch, so when he felt his feet glide against the metal of its edge, he almost panicked and sent himself flying through the invisible ramparts of space again. But Xerneas would not allow this, for she pulled with all she could and slammed the hatch switch closed immediately as Zanz ran into the wall after clambering clumsily to his feet. Whereupon she whirled at him and screamed, "Don't do that again, you twat!"

Breathlessly, readjusting to the air being pumped through the ventilation system, he said, shivering incessantly, "Then - tell me - what that choice was."

She lifted her finger, opening her mouth to speak, and then let it fall down. The adamancy and tenaciousness that she naturally exhibited had atrophied during the time of Zanz's life-threatening, self-inflicted peril. Now she had taken it upon herself to think reasonably whilst her patron acted so goddamn recklessly. "It's not supposed to be revealed," she said softly. "He wouldn't - the laws can't - I can't -"

"Don't follow the laws and rules so strictly, Xerneas," ground out Zanz. He leaned against the wall, training his eyes on her dainty, weakened, feeble stature. Arms wrapped around him, his teeth clattered together like the clackin of a keyboard.

"It's not like I can just do that," she snapped. "The laws must be followed. I can't break them, I can't."

"I'll do it again," said Zanz, and stepped again to the hatch.

She flicked out her arm, stopping him in his tracks. The other grabbed anxiously at her hair, tapped the ivory lust of her horns, held onto the gems they held. "Chris, don't please," she pleaded. "I can tell you, but I just . . . the explicit details must be omitted. You must understand, you have to know my pain. I can't deal with him, but I can't have you dead. It's a double-negative, and I just . . ." She breathed heavily. "You want to know, then? Is that all you want?"

"Yes," he said. "Now stop the incessant stalling. Just tell me, and it'll all be over with."

There was a pause, a pregnant silence, and she said, "It was either I was condemned to the planet forever with my brother at my side at all times, or that you and I would have ourselves on the task of Arceus's own wants and desires, and the troubles of Erdenwald would be solved by our own hands." She looked up. The emotions boiling and unendingly changing within her interior weren't bubbling above the guilty peering she gave him.

"And which did you pick?" But Zanz already knew the answer. He implored for no reason except clarification.

"I picked the latter," she said sadly.


	11. x

Zanz sulked in the cargo hull for days, weeks, months.

They were edging closer to Erdenwald, thanks to Xerneas and her incessant urgency to get there as fast as possible, with each passing moment the shuttle shuddered and shook in the cosmic, almost inexistent winds, the turbulence nigh unbearable. After hearing her speak of him as though he were nothing but a tool that was slightly more tolerance, maybe even less so, than her own brother, whose presence was hostile to her in every way she could fathom, he didn't want to comprehend another statement she bespoke. It was a betrayal she had committed, a treacherous transgression that served as a pivotal point to his trust. Commonly, whenever she knocked upon the metal of the doorway, poking her head between the circular window that looked into the hull, he ignored her as he munched on his unsalted vegetables, gnawing away at them angrily. She would try to apologize, telling him that she was sorry for giving him away to his lordship for the classification of eternal sidekick, but he would have nothing of it, making sure he avoided her artificially apologetic yet aggressive gaze as he worked.

After two months had passed, Xerneas stopped communicating with the man entirely, ending her attempts to reach out. His inability to forgive her and her failing insistence combined to make a dud, and from that dud, choler prevailed. They were both mad at each other, either of them for entirely separate reasons. Yet it was petulant, and nothing was to come from their incapability to speak to one another, for their approach to the planet at the outskirts of the solar system wasn't too far away now. Zanz had wished that he could have seen the rings of Saturn up close, yet he didn't want to see Xerneas and her glaring eyes, so he stayed within his quarters whilst the automated system informed him that they were just passing Saturn's orbit. He smiled sadly to himself. The wry quirking of his lips had dryly spread across his face.

He leaned easily against the cages, rubbing his fingers upon the vertebrae of the Growlithes to pass the time when he wasn't scribbling down things about the botany in his presence and quibbling with Yvetal in the volume of his mind. Erdenwald was gone from his mind, for from underfoot the notions of Xerneas which affected him into the now unwanted truth had replaced them and their urgency; instead he thought only of himself and his life whilst Yvetal fed him unbeknownst guile.

Buried in his work, he barely noticed anything menial like sleep and the passage of time, nor had he thought of washing himself or grooming. His hair had grown long and distanced from cleansing, the black strands clinging to one another, fusing together to form knots. He didn't care, though, and his hermitic, isolated demeanor had returned to its faint originality. Back on the _Satoshi_ , he hadn't anybody except Margaret, and now her annoying presence, though friendly and passionate it had been, was replaced by the omnipresent intonation of the god of Death speaking to him, correcting his addled observations and reminding him of things that he wished he could potentially forget.

The betrayal of Xerneas was at the top of that list. Though he hadn't desired listening to the dark-skinned man whose residence dwelled in the rear of his conscience, he merely did not have a choice. Yvetal mentioned it two or three times a sleeping cycle, and his nightmares obtained sufficient fright to give him shudders once he awakened from his restless slumber. Nowadays, he stumbled amongst the cargo hull with a dreaded limp. The disrepair that muddled his thoughts as he wrote down his findings on the effects of artificial light-source aiding botanical germination made him feel uneasy.

Yet this sleeping cycle had brought upon him something of a dreary disposition. He had awakened from the cool metal of the cargo hull with a migraine pestering at the edges of his conscience, and walking around the small space of the cargo hull, he had noticed that, behind him, the doorway leading into his quarters had opened conspicuously by an entity unbeknownst to himself. He lethargically whirled his head over his shoulder.

Xerneas, unruly and unkempt, stood there. Her eyes were downcast and somber. The smile on her face was forced and artificial. The lighting of the gems inset within her horns are dim. Then she said, her voice a rugged whisper that barely passed through the eerie silence he inhabited, "I'm sorry."

Did she seriously think that a simple apology would undo the things she had done to him hitherto? Was she going insane, just like him? No, he thought. She was a goddess. She had more self-control of herself than he had.

Still frustrated, Zanz turned away from her. If I am not doing something, he thought, I'm going to whirl on her and get mad. So, to prevent this from occurring, he took up the clipboard from the highest shelf, clicking his pen and getting ready to acknowledge the status of a random yet interesting botanical organism. Kneeling beside the Venusian plant housed in its glassteel abode, he said simply, keeping his voice level, "Go. I needn't your negativity amid this pleasant space, y'know."

Xerneas sighed. "It's been six months, two weeks, and three days," she announced.

"Is that so?" he asked indifferently.

"Yes, Christopher. And there's no reason why you shouldn't get out of this pitfall. It's not that serious any longer. Arceus has revoked the choice, and -"

"He didn't do any such thing," said Zanz aggressively. The volatile nature of his voice had made Xerneas wince, and she stepped back a smidgen. "You speak lies."

A pause. Zanz waited, calmly taking notes of its heated environment, adjusting the knobs, watching the dials as they flickered indefinitely. He must keep his repose, at least until it wasn't possible any longer.

Then an additional response that sounded uncharacteristically loathing. "You are starting to sound like Yvetal," she snapped.

"Yvetal knows me better than you do, y'know," he admitted. Although he felt anxious, he still rose from his position and deftly pivoted on her. She looked weary and feeble, but the choler that commonly flowed through her at the mention of her brother overtook her. "He's given me enlightenment and solace in the dark of time," he added. "You used me for your own selfish malcontent, Xerneas, and -"

She growled interjectedly, "I came here to make peace, not violence."

Zanz bristled. "Violence is the last affair of madmen," he snapped. "And if I were to allow myself to consider you apart of mankind, then you would be amongst their consensus."

"Your sanity is questionable, too, Christopher," she said to him. She watched as he contorted his face into a mildly unbearable expression, and she continued before he could utter a word. "So now that we're on the same page, I want you to listen to me. There is no way that we are going to heal the fissure that's spread between us unless we speak to each other." She stepped perilously forward. Her blue hands had reached forward to wrap around his wrist, but he retracted, taking a small step backward. The pain and anger in his eyes set them aflame.

"Please," she pleaded. Her wide, large eyes were unblinking as she stared up at him. Appearing as though she were as innocuous as newborn Ponyta, she continued her staring, lengthening the intensity so much that he had flickered in his tenacity.

Acquiescing wasn't his best spot, but eventually, he staggered and made his unpleasant descent. His anti-social behavior from early life had affected him to this day, making him untrustworthy and unwilling to trust in turn, but it sedated in his isolation, and now, it worked intensely against him and his welcome intentions.

"Make it brief, then," he said.

She smiled. It was pleasant; a calm in the ceaseless storm of unrest that surrounded him for the last half-year. He forgot, perhaps because of how Yvetal spoke so freely and so malignantly about her, that she was beautiful.

Then she gestured for him to follow her out of the hull. She said, "C'mon, Zanz, lemme show you where we are."

He followed her soon. He couldn't resist the unseeable visage that might've laid beyond the protective glassteel, so he strutted, sauntering from the hull and blocking his eyes with his forearm as the light invaded his eyes. He shielded himself from the bright illumination as Xerneas's blue hue gathered close. Then, when he found himself accustomed to the light, he withdrew his arm from his vision, and the petite goddess stood eloquently in front of him, her hands folded behind her back, her eyes transfixed upon his own dim irises.

And behind her sat the amazing spectacle of Uranus. Its aglow surface of darkened hues of blue was cropped with crevices and elevations that were divvied with shadows. The silhouettes brought upon by them were cold and cool just as its innate surface must have been, but it still attained a iridescence that piled on his conscience with a clumsy precision. He watched it as the small asteroids and flakes of rock and dust spun around its enormity in a circular movement, and their spinning disposition superseded him in painting the mild picture of awesome amid the velvet sheet of space with its endlessly compiling stars and planets undiscovered.

He saw the planet through the telescopes that Powell himself owned on some of his ventures through the _Satoshi_ , going from each planet and observing them with an astronomer's intention, but never had he expected to be so near to the planet. Even when he was informed by Lemon himself, there was no need to think that they would actually achieve any of the goals that they had set for themselves, but now, as he hovered through space in a small shuttle containing only the quintessential objects for a single human's survival, he felt even farther from any type of intelligent creatures as he took sight of the enlarged planet. He could make no approximations to their distance from the planet itself, but the fact that it overtook the glassteel visor told him that it was closer than he truly anticipated, and it frightened him. He stumbled backward and frantically whispered a few commands into the air that would have set the visors blinds downward if he had the shuttle's hand-held remote, yet nothing substantial occurred in these fleeting moments. Looking at Uranus, he felt like he might pass out; for all the blood which ran through his vessels soon started their ascent into his brain, engendering the meager headache that surfaced at the edges of his mind.

Xerneas noticed this, and reached forward for the man before he nearly ran into the side of the shuttle and activated the airlock once more. "Honey," came her whisper, "calm yourself, please."

He took deep breaths, but nothing could assist him in his need to sit down and look away from the frightening conception of Uranus. He never thought that he'd be afraid of a planet, of all things that could potentially incite fear within one's mind, yet his visage refused to take its enormity into his mind.

Guiding him back into the cargo hull, she rested him easily against one of the numerous shelves that lined the metallic walls, and knelt next to him as he pressed his head against the shelf. She pushed aside some of the strands of hair that cropped out from his messy fringe, and tucked it behind his ear affectionately. The ting on her cheeks didn't go unnoticed by the man as he turned to her. He saw that her eyes beheld happiness in its simplest manifestation, and was unnerved by it.

"Panic attack?" she asked patiently. She wound her fingers through his hair absently as she waited for a response.

He shook his head, pushing the fingers which ruffled his hair from him entirely. He was not in the mood to be coddled. "I've never had something along those lines," he admitted harshly, the words escaping his mouth with a significant bout of force.

"There's always a first time for everything," she reminded him.

"Well, I doubt that I had a panic attack, Xerneas," he said in a coarse voice haggard with breaths constricted and restrained. "I just . . . saw Uranus, and I couldn't deal with it. I don't like the fact that we're so far away from Earth, so far away from humanity."

"There are living creatures that live on Erdenwald," she said desperately, but she let out a little whine when he looked up at her with eyes filled with anger.

"But those are not my kin. And besides, to think that I will soon have to be their prophet, as a person who has never truly experienced their customs and has no intentions of ever doing so, it irks me. The entire existence of that planet, however reassuring it may be for you, is unnerving, and I trust nothing of it unless contact comes into fruition and I can see it for my own eyes." He sighed as she momentarily beamed at him, a radiant smile grasping her lips in a gleeful purchase. "That doesn't mean I'll like it, though," he added.

This hadn't affected her smile. "You'll come to Erdenwald, though?"

"I'll think about it," he said.

"I hope you say yes, Christopher Zanz. Otherwise, I think you will have a long time to stare at that planet right there," she remarked deliberately, and he perceived it almost as a threat. Whether or not it was, he had no idea, but the fact that she looked momentarily intimidating as she uttered those words unnerved him just as much as the thought of Erdenwald and its elusive people's existence.

Softly, she pat his cheek with her hand twice. The moments lingered, her hand resting coldly on his face, her fingers tapping a rhythm that felt odd and queer. Her healing abilities didn't seem to render the tired creases in his face inexistent, and her palm settled into the indentations. "Get some rest, Christopher," she amended at last. Rising from her spot next to the man and padding out of the cargo hull to man the shuttle once more, she left Zanz sitting there, his eyes watching her as she went to leave him. And although the acceleration of the _Hubb_ was something that he was used to by now, it roiled his stomach and made him queasy as it was activated, Xerneas's pushing her translucent hands through the machinery and blasting the metal thing into the vacuous depths of space almighty.

He watched as her head drooped and her hair started rising higher than the iridescent antlers that emerged from her cranium. The spectacle was immersing, and he soon did the same as the goddess of Life. He dropped his head and shut his eyes, letting them fall. He dozed off soon, and the last thought that crossed his mind before he entered the dreams of weird conception was one of how irregular Xerneas could be with her emotions and the way they were displayed to him. But it dissipated in the wake of his sleep, soon forgotten, but not entirely distanced from his conscience.


	12. xi

The diagnostics of the _Hubb_ , which had been floating listlessly amongst the vacuum of space for months with a single human advocate resting within its confines, began deteriorating soon after Zanz witnessed the small dwarf planet of Pluto, its moon orbiting slowly around the meteor-cratered surface of the floating mass of rock. Xerneas was watching the numbers slowly decline, and even admitted that their thrusters were exhausted and she was wasting even more of her endowment to bring the ship through space to Erdenwald. He commonplace associated the declining status of the ship to the goddess commonly at its helm, and as he sat at the back of the hull and peered upon her dimmed luminosity, he knew that they were both moving towards dysfunction, malcontent with their lack of control and power through the journey in space.

He didn't mind the slow draining of the _Hubb_ , however. He was more concerned with his own health, and how its decline was obscenely increased in the last few months. Both he and Xerneas flitted away from communication, keeping to themselves, but he made it a point to refrain from complete isolation, pulling the cold, dim-lit goddess from the helm before she slumped across the dash and began to distinctly fade away. He was scared that she would disappear on him, that he would be stuck in space with no fuel, no power and, after running through his remaining rations, no food, and acted accordingly to this fear, making sure that she wasn't slipping away as he was. They spoke frequently, their longing for land and others abounding their necessities and enlisting their thoughts for extreme haywire.

He didn't believe that an immortal could go mad, especially one who had lived with their counterpart for more than three thousand years, but looking upon her, he supposed she was as worse as she was going to get. Yvetal had been silent since his appearance prior, keeping himself far from both Zanz and Xerneas, and even if Yvetal had done abhorrent things hitherto his encampment within the Rock of Enigmas, he would have appreciated the banter, the wit which emanated from his mouth, translating an admixture of choler and glee that would have easily contrasted his stressful isolation. More playful than serious, Yvetal was a great escape from the boring in-betweens that followed his hourly check-ups on his botany, and sometimes, he tried to contact the god of Death through his thoughts, calling out to him and pleading with his life for the dark-skinned man to release him from their loneliness. All these attempts went in vain, the substantial necessity of communication undermined by his vengeance and need to torment the two into submission.

He refrained from speaking about Yvetal within Xerneas's proximity, so instead, he spoke about his family, friends and the things he loved back on Earth. Usually, it was Xerneas that engendered the conversation, questioning him about the things which were supposed to be obscenely unimportant to him. Astronauts were told the moment that they began their training that if they do set out upon space-travel, they should have no qualms with staying up there for as long as the mission had required. And Zanz had always went by this code as he walked amongst the panels of the _Satoshi_ , thinking nothing wrong of the want to be away from all of the people on Earth. Their germs were cantankerous, their inability to keep themselves confined to their own spheres of privacy was an obnoxious article to sustain, and generally including himself within public situations was toxic beyond comprehension, for both of the parties involved.

He just wished that he could take it all back now. He remembered when he'd stare outside of his dinky apartment in Lumiouse. He was a child and his mother struggled with money to keep the place afloat, so they lived in a one-bedroom apartment where the two of them slept in the same room until Zanz turned twelve, where he then began sleeping inside the living room, his bed being the couch. He'd walk up to the glass in the bedroom and looked down at the sidewalks from the tenth floor. He saw the bustling of the streets beneath him, the cars zooming through the streets and the pedestrians yelling at the unwelcome drivers that strayed too close to the sidewalks. The sound of the city was obnoxious, constantly filling his ears with clangor, intonations of all sorts and the secular noises generated by the stray Pokémon that wandered the streets or the domestic ones which ran alongside their trainers.

He looked out of the window now; no sounds came from the outside as he peered downward at the unending splattering of stars encapsulating the universe in boundless energy lasting millions of years. So far away from anybody, he realized as he gazed into the direction of the other planets of the solar system. Earth, where his withering mother was slowly dying in her house, on her lonesome. Earth, where he wished he could travel to within moments. Earth, where his discoveries would be appreciated by all those who wished to escape from it so he could appreciate _it_ more. Earth, where his friends at the university were still accommodating, their voices whining about how unexciting their life was down there on the precious land, seeing the rush of water, simply _hearing_ the waves crash against each other. He envied even their ability to have white noise surrounding them, because he yearned for the lulling sounds of fast cars, complaining individuals and the Pokémon which populated the planet. The only sounds that he heard on the _Hubb_ were the puling of the young litter of Growlithes that were born just two weeks ago, and the exhausted exhales of the goddess of life from the front of the shuttle, her lips slightly parted to let the sound emanate throughout the ship. Distraught, they were; all the inhabitants of the _Hubb._

He wondered how the crew in the Satoshi were feeling right now. All of them seemed happy with their accommodations, but he knew that they weren't beneath the same stress that he was. Mary was probably going on about her way with her loud voice and big accomplishments being waved in front of their faces. He could see her multicolored hair through his squinted eyes, the glow of her smile, the shining of her eyes. Lemon perhaps was having struggles with his crew, keeping them under control and making sure that they didn't blow a hole in the hull and accidentally kill all the _Satoshi_ 's inhabitants. The weary expression he adorned throughout the duration of his captain's time was now worn by Zanz himself, the bags underneath his eyes darkened and deep, the dimness of his eyes increasingly surreal. He assumed that Pelo was trying to convince the tired, exhausted Lemon that he needed to change his policies about robotics and fix them to adhere to his manic inventions. The robotic engineer would stop at nothing to revert the captain to his initial state of disregard, and even though there were many different occasions where Lemon had thrown Pelo out of the _Satoshi_ with only a tether connecting the nanosuit adorned by the unaffected roboticist to the travelling space station, never would the entourage of claims of better living and survival rate cease, seeing as Pelo's passionate disposition rarely lost steam.

The shuttle, however, didn't include these civil arguments or influences due to the fact that the inhabitants refused debates of any kind; for their purpose was useful in the never-ending vacuum of space. Until they arrived at Erdenwald, where Zanz was supposed to play prophet of both Yvetal and Xerneas, who could not be seen by anyone else except him, nothing of significance was to be brought up considering. Sure, there were many times when dysfunctions about the _Hubb_ were treated so delicately that Zanz constantly forgot about his original mission and how fruitless everything seemed, but these were few and far between.

But the fuel situation was a problem that he was excited to indulge in, because the act of having something to do besides tend to his plants was more grateful than he would have thought of otherwise. This was an indefinite situation which affected them greatly, as the loss of fuel was beginning to grate on Xerneas's internal endowment. He had to scrounge about the shuttle for ingredients to manufacture the fuel into a consumable liquid in inject within the shuttle. It was a struggle, using the makeshift setup at the back of the cargo hold to develop fuel for the shuttle, but in the end, he was happy when the chemicals from the canisters found in the safe boxes around the cargo hold could be used to create such perilous things.

The hardest part, however, was transferring the single one-liter canister of fuel outside of the shuttle into the indefinite frigidity of space, which would freeze the liquid within the uninsulated canister within seconds of exposure to the pure vacuum of space. He had thought of enveloping the small container with scraps of nanosuit he used as a makeshift blanket to prevent the cold from affecting the canister immediately, but experiments using other liquids of almost the same freezing point (he guessed as much, as the databases in the shuttle had given him scarce information about the concoction made from scratch he intended to put inside the _Hubb_ from the outside) had ended fruitlessly as he tracked the amount of time between exposure and freezing with the nanosuit scraps surrounding the container. He cursed when his experiments' outcomes were innately unsatisfactory, and although he was aggravated about it all, he still found happiness and glee within his work as he indefinitely began development on a canister which would withhold the coldness of space.

So he went through the motions to find whatever materials could be used as insulation. Zanz tried more of the nanosuit fabric, which hadn't worked just as he thought it might not. The frost which gathered upon its flimsy surface then grew brittle and unusable as it broke apart the moment he tried to remove it from the canister. There goes my blanket, he thought.

Shortly thereafter, Zanz began experimenting with the collective shed fur of the Growlithes kept in the cages, collecting it from beneath their paws and combining it using dangerous molecular fusion. The aftermath of that excursion had nearly decimated the cargo hold into a searing, desolate space wherein ashes would rapidly accumulate, but thankfully, he was able to lessen the peril of the altercation by carefully redirecting the excess energy expelled by the fusion to another outlet. He'd gathered from the biologists on the _Satoshi_ that their fur was resistant to all sorts of extreme conditions, including below freezing temperatures back on Earth. But as he wrapped the fused fur around the canister and threw it out of the miniature airlock with the tether attached to it in his grasp, he withdrew it to find that the Growlithe fur couldn't withstand the temperatures outside in space.

Zanz slowly began to resent the fact that the people who developed the _Hubb_ were so incompetent that they had to make it difficult to even refuel during an expedition. It was growing increasingly evident to him that the situation wherein he was located was surreal and queer in all senses, but this still didn't make it any less aggravating for him when he thought they simply could have placed the fueling slot into the back of the cargo hold, removing the need to exit the shuttle and refuel from the exterior. However, the shuttle was made for little expeditions, meant to return to the _Satoshi_ once its fuel began to lower less than twenty percent, where it could efficiently refuel, and this fact resonated within Zanz as he continuously brute-forced through the difficult situation placed in front of him, thoughts of egregious distaste floating amid his mind.

Then, in a stroke of genius that he thought came from Arceus himself, he found the solution to his problem.

Working on extracting samples from his plants was customary for Zanz himself, having his astrobotanist title actually mean something after location of plant-life was discovered. And throughout these samplings, there were discoveries about the dispositions of these certain plants. Zanz experimented greatly on Earth with pressure withstanding with plants from Mars, whose atmosphere was thin and thus created a cold surface which the plant-life thrived within. Although it wasn't as cold as the vacuum of space, which was unaffected by the sun, the basic construction of certain Martain plants were able to circumvent these cold temperatures to properly grow and thrive within such extreme environments and conditions. The malleability of these plants, too, were exceptional due to the high winds and dust storms and freezing weather which affected the surface of the planet, and their flexibility, while innately frustrating whenever Zanz attempted to stand them upright without the assistance of Xerneas's life-empowering abilities, was indefinitely lifesaving for him in this very moment.

From a spare Martain potato plant that was experimented endlessly through intensive sessions of scientific research and sleepless days tending to the slowly growing Martain plant-life that was the solution, he created a several-coated layer of skin shaved from plants themselves, fusing them together and fitting it to the canister. He didn't know whether or not it was going to work, but his experiments revealed to him the usefulness of the hitherto disregarded plant, having saved the _Hubb_ from complete cease in function once he found out that the potatoes could reasonably withstand the frigidity of space, within parameters which were already slimmer and smaller than the stalks of his Mercurian plants.

So when he climbed out of the _Hubb_ with the fuel in its canister and the layering of skin wrapped around it and came to the fuel port wherein a small nozzle inserted into the main centrifuge of fuel consumption, he was relieved the know that the meager liter of fuel which ailed him for several weeks of ceaseless experimentation and failing hypotheses was finally able to be used without freezing in open space. When he reentered the shuttle with a successful smile breaking across his addled features, he slowly, methodically bereaved Xerneas of her position as the helm of the _Hubb_ that sleep cycle, telling her that she was finally able to rest after so long controlling the shuttle through the emptiness of space, and when she turned to him with desolate eyes that bespoke unrest and weariness, he insisted, pulling her dainty, numb form away from the dashboard controls and to the cargo hull, where Zanz usually slept and relaxed.

His plants had perked up slightly at the promixity of the goddess of Life, but the diminished extraction of her abilities desecrated its inherently unstoppable growing, which was why using her as a tool during the potatoes growth was an unacceptable option.

And with the assistance of Zanz, who sat beside her as her eyes fell and her exhaustion suddenly peaked, she slept for the first time in weeks, maybe even a few months. She was devout in her attempts to get to Erdenwald, even if the journey itself was draining her from the inside and out, and although Zanz wanted nothing more than to keep her powerful within his presence, she was drifting each day wherein she was despondent, unresponding to an onslaught of questions which would usually engender hours of meandering conversation.

And he watched her sleep, the rise and fall of her chest slowly regaining some of her illumination with every breath, the seven colored stones in her horns aglow in the serenity of her position; it was beautiful, the sight of such an elegant creature finally being tranquil after prolonged turmoil and unrest.

The central computer systems of the _Hubb_ informed him that it was nearly a quarter till three in the morning. He assumed that he, too, might as well go to sleep, and whilst he set himself on his side next to Xerneas on the cold shuttle floor, his face pressed against the metal sheets that separated him from the blackness of the universe outside its protection, he thought that this was a revolutionary mark in his journey.

This was not Xerneas's alone any longer; for he intentionally furthered the lifespan of the _Hubb_ to get it properly to Erdenwald. His contribution was not one of simple disregard anymore, but instead was a meaningful position to the problems at large which affected the two of them completely. Now he was on board, and if he were to make it to Erdenwald, he would do it without diminishing his only friend throughout this inherently monstrous slog through space.

Maybe if he had the chance (and he hoped he did), he would perhaps return to the _Satoshi_ with the changed mindset of a man more open to corroboration than lonesome research, but those hopeful days were behind him. On Erdenwald, he would find his beloved plant-life, sample it, experiment on it, make notes and details about its features, chemical make-up, and send his findings back to the _Satoshi_ , who would send it to Earth.

Yes, he wanted to go back, and yes, he would jump at the bit to finally make the journey to Earth once more, but he needed to make sure that his trek wasn't in vain, wasn't a decision made by a madman who lost his mind in the dizzying, unsettling disposition of space. He needed his plants.

And he would get them, no matter the cost.


	13. xii

And there in the depths of space, Zanz worked and worked until his exhaustion overtook him, and when he awakened, he worked some more, never ceasing. The _Hubb_ was growing increasingly dysfunctional in the past few weeks, and he wasn't ready to let his only way to sprawling lands go to waste, to the darkened purchase of Giratina, so the cargo hull soon became a workshop crowded with plants and makeshift machines made from scraps found within the unused boxes located upon the stacked inset shelves. Xerneas had time to relax and communicate with Zanz as he worked, encouraging him to keep on it and make sure that everything was up and running. She invigorated his enthusiasm to a definite level of merriment, and always worked much better whenever she was afraid, her slowly revitalized presence causing him to grow steadily more jovial about the trek.

There was a sort of unnerving quality to her voice as she spoke, though, that he sometimes noticed in the most fleeting of moments when she thought he wasn't listening. It was the strained intonation she had used when she had spoke to him about Yvetal and his evidently evil deeds. Except now, it was directed towards him. He didn't know what to make of this information, really, and decided that ignoring it would be better than to encounter an argument with her, seeing as the happier atmosphere lent well to his significantly bettered work ethic.

And in the last few weeks, he made regular visits outside after stopping the shuttle and making periodic repairs on its outside panels, the miniscule punctures engendered by bits of asteroids slowly leaking vital oxygen from the inside of its hull, taking his time fixing the thrusters at the back that were worn and overused in the time of their trek of the solar system. Usually, these excursions would eat up hours of his time, and he would come back into the space shuttle with various amounts of bruises mark the surface of his face with pockmarks of purple, darkened skin, but he found that it was better to work than to do nothing. Being bored and unenthusiastic was debilitating in general, and having the ideology of a scientist who was always working, always discovering, always contributing to the betterment of knowledge, was made more evident whenever he sat at the helm of the shuttle, looking forward at nothing except the massive black nothingness which surrounded them at all times. Having nothing to do was abhorrent, excruciating, unacceptable.

And throughout his time, he found the unblinking stars were not enough to pierce through his conscience and remind him that this was not all that existed, but he saw them frivolously occasionally, and remembered that space, no matter the infinite distance, was his dream. But this was no dream; this was an unstimulating nightmare of undoing.

Yet one day, as he exited the shuttle to fix a thruster that had been struck by a small asteroid flying through space, he saw in the distance, a few hundred-thousand kilometers away, a large nebulous cloud of condensed gas. It was the first almost material thing he had seen since Pluto, the dwarf planet itself being nothing but another unreachable landmark that he surpassed with persistence. Through the blackened haze of his mask, he was able to spot it out from the other blackness of the universe because of the concentration of the element, and soon, he assumed, they would come into contact with the massive space storm dwelling way beyond the threshold apparent to probes sent to Pluto. He thought that he should have been happy, having something else to ground himself to reality, to make sure that he wasn't imagining everything which surrounded him. But it didn't. All it did was make him weary, almost scared as to what might happen to him if he crossed its unchanging path. He had looked at it with increasing hesitancy as he continued his work on the thruster, repairing it the best he could as he involuntarily flicked his visage towards the large, contrasting, darkened cloud, and when he entered the shuttle again with Xerneas awaiting his arrival with a smile present on her face, it dropped as soon as she saw the dreadful expression that adorned Zanz's face.

"Christopher, what's wrong?" she asked, stepping forward to meet him after he closed the airlock door and extracted the oxygen mask from his face. "You look like you've just seen a ghost."

He nigh scoffed at the declaration, but he accepted the worry which infected her intonation. Wriggling out of his nanosuit and hanging both the mask and it in the cargo hull, he breathed heavily, crawling to the control panels with lethargic movement. He only spoke when he ran through the screens with increasing trepidation, and examined an article found deep within the interface of the _Hubb'_ s computers. "That's a carbon storm, right over there," he said, pointing forward at the cloud of condensed carbon accumulating so far from their position.

Xerneas squinted through the glassteel curiously, and following his finger, she found what he was pointing at. She withheld a gasp from escaping her lips, but Zanz had heard the intake of breath and whipped his head around to investigate its dubious origin. When he cocked an eyebrow at her with the dreadful expression on his face deepening, she caved into his look. "That's not a carbon storm, Chris," she said softly.

Zanz eyed her. "Not a carbon storm, eh? Mission Control has sent probes past Pluto, y'know, after the colonization of Mars and their popularity gave way to more expeditionary measures to outer sol sys travel. And one of the probes, according to the article here on the comp, located high concentrations of gaseous carbon blown by unknown winds more than" - he looked back at the screen, squinting - "wow, 500 kph. Those are some high winds. No wonder that probe was decommissioned the moment it entered the storm. It probably got struck by some debris or something. Anyways, either we are going to have to avoid that when we get there so we can hurry and get to Erdenwald, or go through it. But that would destroy the shuttle. Don't want to do that."

"We're going to have to go through it anyways," she said grimly.

Zanz turned on her, his expression questioning. "Huh? What's that mean?"

"I told you, that's not a carbon storm. In order to prevent people from entering or seeing the dominion of Erdenwald, Arceus created a sphere of darkness that enveloped the planet. This stopped many of the people from Earth from seeing it through their damned telescopes, because the sun wouldn't reach that far, and if it had, the sunlight would simply go around it. That isn't a carbon storm; that's a sphere of darkness."

Zanz turned up his face. That sounded insane. Unscientific, of course, but the existence of this woman here was, too, especially her individual appearance within his living quarters all the way back on the _Satoshi._ "So in that storm, Erdenwald sits?" he asked skeptically, a scoff on the edge of his lips.

Clasping her hands together and leaning forward, Xerneas enthusiastically nodded. "Yes. Right in the center."

"And we're going to have to go through it, thereby risking the destruction of the _Hubb_ like the fate of that poor probe." He leaned back into the chair, leaning his head backward and taking a deep breath. "Why do you gods have to make things so difficult? This is in the middle of space, Xerneas. You couldn't have disguised the thing as a dwarf planet and simply made it appear as though it was lifeless instead of putting a carbon storm -"

"Sphere of darkness," she corrected, lifting a finger.

He shook his head. Her tenacity was sometimes unwelcome, and here it was, too. Correcting himself, Zanz said, "Arceus had to make a sphere of darkness just to prevent humans from seeing it?"

"Yes. He didn't want anybody looking up into the sky and seeing it."

Zanz laughed. Not a laugh of merriment, no, but a shrill, hysterical laugh which emanated from beings condemned with a disease of madness. "It's past Pluto, for his sake!" he shouted between maddened chuckles. "We can barely see that little dingy dwarf planet from Earth itself. How were we going to see Erdenwald from all the way down there?"

"I don't know, Chris, but it wasn't my decision, y'know," she snapped.

The unnerving intonation she used which went unnoticed most of the time began to sprout right then, and Zanz wasn't ignorant of it now, due to his own adamant demeanor about this subject. He waved a hand, though. It wasn't too bad now, at least. If she didn't goad him, he assumed that it would be better. If she did . . . well, he didn't want to find out, really. She had made some harsh, rash decisions before, and he had forgiven her then. If something happened again, if either of them goaded the other. . . . He would find out when it occurred.

"Yeah, yeah," he said dismissively. He looked back through the observing window towards the swirling, spiraling mass of uncontrollable power that stood in his way to Erdenwald. He wouldn't sacrifice his work to go through it, though. It was too valuable. He gestured vaguely at it with his arm, and said with a lilt of incredulity swimming in his tone, "So we actually have to go through that thing. Which may kill me because of the swirling mass of debris and gaseous carbon that rests there, not to add in the trace amounts of hydrogen, nitrogen and all sorts of other elements that could be lethal in their purest forms if they come through the panels of the shuttle. On top of all that threatening the ship and myself, we might still be unable to properly operate the landing gear in the _Hubb_ due to some dysfunctions caused by the damned carbon storm. Now, with all my plants and my _fuel-making station,_ does that remotely sound safe for me or my influx of research work on astrobotany?"

Xerneas poured. "No, but -"

"No," intoned Zanz. "That's a ball of death and destruction waiting for us when we get out on the other side. I might die."

"Chris, I can protect you."

Zanz scoffed. Ignoring her comment, he said aggressively, derisively, "And what about my plants, huh? What about those? Those are my pride and joy. If they're gone, that's my whole career, my entire life's work, down the drain and forgotten in the midst of space where no one can hear you scream and no one in their right mind will be able to save you from a planet that's so hard to get to, I have to sacrifice everything just to find it. And what for? So you can get me to get rid of everything so I can be a new man under the guise of a prophet for you and Arceus, and even Yvetal? That's ultimately selfish."

"I am trying to make your life better, Christopher! I have offered you this great responsibility that you can uphold for all of eternity, and you can live for as long as you want on Erdenwald. You can be someone else there, finally away from all the sadness and ridicule from everybody else on Earth who doesn't care about the world, or its nature, or the shunned secularists such as yourself. You came into the world of botany because you wanted to see how nature itself worked, and I am here right now, showing you what Mother Nature herself is like. I am the goddess of Life, y'know. I am all that you care about. Those plants? My creation. On Mars, Mercury, Venus? Those plants were created by me before I was stuck with Yvetal in the Rock of Enigmas. You cherish everything that I have created, and never have you thanked me for my hospitality. You have insulted me nearly throughout this entire trip, and treated me as though I was nothing but a liability to you."

"Because you are!" he shouted.

This was a mistake by far. He didn't mean to shout, or say those words, but they simply escaped his mouth so rapidly, it was impossible to cease their movement from his throat to his lips. She staggered backwards at the comment, her horns' dimmed gems aglow with a deviant flame they hadn't attained before.

Zanz, suddenly afraid of the repercussions of his rash declaration, stood forthwith from the chair, ready to say that he was sorry and that he didn't mean it. It always felt as though Yvetal was infecting his thoughts and making him feel such animosity towards Xerneas for the most mundane of purposes, and this was one of its examples, where the god of Death would influence Zanz into saying something inherently offensive and propagate the message that he didn't want to associate with the goddess of Life for a little while. But as soon as he stretched out his hand to touch her cheek and comfort her, she backed away again. The glowing gems on her horns shone brighter.

"You're ungrateful. You should have never touched the Rock," she said in a grating voice choked with despair and desecration. She sniffed when he remained silent, and turned on her heel to walk into the cargo hull. He tried to follow her into it, but she shut the door behind her. He heard the resonant lock hatch snap into place seconds later, and he knew that she was stuck inside.

Then came the most horrendous sound that Zanz had ever heard before: the shattering of glass.

In a rush, he was at the cargo hull metallic door, his hand pressing hard against the cool feel of the sleek, compressed metals as it slammed over and over into the surface. Indentations slowly filled up the widened surface, both from strikes of his fists and of his feet, but within the cargo hull, the rampage that was engendered by their argument persistent without any sense of hesitation. Zanz had yelled, screaming out her name, and if there were anyone else around to judge him for his actions, he didn't think he would do so, rather picking his way through the situation and attempting to make a compromise. But at the moment, anger and choler flowed through his veins like molten lava straight from Olympus Mons on Mars, and his face, slick with sweat rushing down from his forehead, was just as dull red as its exposed surface.

She had destroyed that of which was threatened by Yvetal.

Something he would never had thought of her until now.

Because now . . . it was now that he knew the truth behind all her intentions.

He was sure that his voice was hoarse and broken from comprehension after ten minutes of screaming, and it was worse hearing those abhorrent sounds emanating from the cargo hull without his apparently unneeded consent. The shattering of glass continued; the sounds of stalks snapping in half came forthwith; the sounds of sloshing fuel frequented the small space of the shuttle. He leaned against the cool door with his mouth shut tight and his eyes closed, and the sweat from his forehead then came down his cheeks to intermingle with the stray tears which leaked from his eyes. With each passing moment, another one of his plants suffered punishments beyond coherency, engendered by a madwoman whose sole purpose was to make it back to Erdenwald. All his life work, all the growing he had done in the last few months going through the desolate vacuum of space, was gone and done with by the goddess of Life, who was supposed to keep such life thriving and unthreatened by outside sources of malice and malcontent. Those sounds became cacophonous the longer he remained there, but they soon lilted away, slower and less frequent than hitherto.

When he found the strength to stand from his position and waddle over to the helm, he wiped his tears and stood, ready to make the seemingly treacherous trek towards the control panels. Slumping into the cushioned chair and straightening himself, he began flitting through the window of the panels, looking behind him all the while to see if Xerneas had decided to escape from her meaningless confines. He'd quickly documented the position of the carbon storm apparent in the distance, dark and flowing and ebbing with stray rocks and asteroids and winds that picked up speeds higher than 750 kph, having marked it on the map being north-westward in orbit from Pluto, which was way behind them now, only a mere dot amongst the other planets he'd passed by in the last year or two.

There it is, he thought. Beyond the threshold of that carbon storm which particularly obfuscated everything within it and around it, a large hunk of rock with living consciences thrived and lived amongst each other without the technological influence of science, and it was there where he now belonged.

All of his life's work was now gone and done away with by Xerneas, who thought it efficient to bring her fist upon his distant disbelief and disapproval of responsibility, who took away all that he loved dear and cared for in this universe to inure him to the life of unscientific debilitation. She had crafted the perfect prophet from this man of science, who represented a sort of cosmonaut which travelled through the solar system with an astrobotanist degree wasting away at his belt and was destroyed by an entity which should not, in any case of spectral projection, or artificial manifestation of a rogue consciousness brought together by scientific means, exist at all. He would roam the lands of the barren surface of the planet, looking for ragged civilization after ragged civilization with the sort of uninterested despondency he employed upon the _Satoshi_ whenever someone wished for him to deliver a message across parties as an outlet, a messenger warranted for nothing except sending communication through two beings unwilling to speak face to face. This happened quite frequently, he thought, and he hated it. She would have him hating his role throughout the next few years of his existence, or he could. . . .

He looked out the window longingly.

No, he thought as he shook his head. Depressurizing in the vacuum of apace wasn't the happiest of ways to go out of his universe, he knew. He could go out in his sleep after drinking some liquid mercury located in a box in the cargo hull. But ending it now wasn't the best choice. He had to set in a sense of vengeance he had seen first in Yvetal when he had visited hitherto.

She had destroyed his world; he would do the same to hers.


	14. xiii

It came closer with each passing day, the storm approaching slowly in the visage of the glassteel window. He knew what would happen as soon as he passed through the heavy winds which encapsulated its existence, but his plan was formulated, and was prepared to do whatever it took to make his vengeance possible.

Xerneas had exited the cargo hull a day after their initial argument, and Zanz ignored her as she pestered and badgered him with questions. He stayed silent, though, and refused to speak during these inquisitive excursiona, finding himself unable to speak to someone who threw away his life for their own selfish wants. He left the helm one time to go into the cargo hull and examine the damage her rampage had engendered, and the moment he saw the withering disposition of his plants, the Venusian Flyer dried up and wrinkled until its disc was a meager representation of its former self, the Mars potatoes splayed all around with their rust red appearance evaporated and drawn into a dingy brown coloration that spread athwart its whole surface area, the Mercury vegetation that he brought from Earth to study further on his journey through the solar system broken at the stalk and leaves ripped apart, the darkened chlorophyll leaving a rotten stench about the entirely of the small, enclosed space, he felt as though he was going to cry, but he stepped back and breathed, his eyes stinging with tears he threatened in place.

He held onto the side of the door frame, sinking his teeth into his knuckles and trying hard to think about how he was to fix this. But he couldn't. The damage done was irreparable, his plants were destroyed beyond conception. He'd cared for those scanned plants throughout his days, making sure that they stayed alive during these treacherous months where he used his own vital water supply, added to by his excess urine which ran through a filtering system and into a small, stainless steel bottle, to give them appropriate life. The Venusian Flyer of all things was contained in a large mechanism that provided all its quintessential qualities for life, and there it was, the remains of it shattered upon the ground near the desolated fuel station. The knobs and nozzles used to isolate the atmosphere of th _e Hubb_ from the centralized disposition of Venus's atmospheric conditions were broken, and through the leaks of the conditioned pot of steaming regolith, now unimpeded by the protective glassteel keeping the consistently high temperatures from escaping, he could feel the heat emanating from it, could feel the intense burning sensation running thoroughly through his body. But seeing them, his precious plants, his whole life's work, there on the floor with life drained from their veins was equivalent to watching someone you loved die of an unexpected heart attack right in front of you: you never anticipated anything of the sort would happen, but once it did, there was an immense amount of guilt and begrudging denial about the grief presented in front of you.

It was as though Margaret laid on the floor in front of him, where her hair was splayed out and mottled with blood, her wacky attire being spotted with the gleaming, flowing crimson liquid, sleeping through the fabric and demonstrating just how tragic the situation was. The Growlithes and their pups looked at the rampage done by the goddess of Life with weary eyes, shuddering lightly as Zanz walked off, skulking back to the helm where Xerneas was waiting patiently for him. But he said nothing to her as he took his seat.

Xerneas watched him during this, and she tried to apologize for her actions, telling Zanz that she was sorry and didn't mean any of it, she was only doing it because she needed his full loyalty, yet he would not hear her out. He sent the _Hubb_ at full speed towards the carbon storm. She soon began to notice that her deliberate attempts to make him see her plight was futile.

He didn't think that Xerneas understood how important his plants were to him. He believed that she was just as despondent as Yvetal was to the human kind due to their inability to communicate with them for three millennia, but at least the god of Death was willing to spare the life of his plants, feeling sorry for Zanz for trusting Xerneas. And he finally understood now what the god was attempting to instill within the astrobotanist: she wasn't as innocuous as she first appeared. Since their journey started, she had a hot temper and acted harshly due to minor situations, but also was nice and kind during other excursions, leading him to believe that she suffered through a disorder of some sort, although he was under the notion that gods couldn't have mental ailments. However, she displayed a prominent disconnection from the truth and diluted herself in most instances, bringing her brother down intensely for no other reason than just to do so. From human psychology, she demonstrated borderline personality disorder, something that Zanz was not unaccustomed to. Yvetal tried to warn him, attempt to see the goddess of Life through the prospective of someone who lived with her for generations, but Zanz did not heed his forewarning, retaining his trust and loyalty of the goddess of Life with the persistent influence of Yvetal.

What he had said to Xerneas before was true: _Yvetal knows me better than you._ But he hadn't thought of how correct that simple declaration was until now, when he was encountered by a higher betrayal than Xerneas selling him out to Arceus beforehand.

Yvetal knew Zanz better because he saw him on an equal playing field with the astrobotanist, but because of his snarky attitude and bad mouth, Zanz thought him to be worse than Xerneas without listening to the content of his words.

Yvetal understood the struggles which ailed the scientist, and thought it significant to bring them up in conversation, to use his own personal experiences to compare their similarities. To make them more compatible.

Xerneas only wished to talk about herself and the things which were done by both her and Arceus, unwilling to include Zanz within the conversation until recently, when his trust was valuable to her indefinitely

Yvetal wanted his trust before it was valuable to him.

Xerneas did not.

Zanz didn't know Yvetal better than he knew Xerneas, but he knew that he felt more trustworthy of the untrustworthy god of Death than of the goddess of Life.

He knew this as a mistake now, however, not listening to Yvetal when he had the chance. He banged his hand against his forehead. He should have listened.

But his blind trust brought him all this way, to beyond the thrust of the solar system's justifiable lengths and into the meaningless vacuum of space.

Did this branch out to Erdenwald's existence, too?

No, it couldn't have, he thought, pushing away the myriad notions that swirled through his mind at the unsupported declaration. Yvetal had confirmed its existence, if indifferently, with the manifestation of that red orb, where the population of the planet thrived in clumps; civilizations, he realized. Xerneas could not be lying about that, of course, but what if Yvetal was, too?

He shook his head. All this thinking of betrayal and paranoia was starting to weigh on his shoulders, and he began wondering if this was the beginning of madness he had attempted to drive from his mind since the start of their journey. He had read of so many isolated individuals growing increasingly insane during their encampment in the small library of the _Satoshi,_ and now, he believed partially that this was the start of his own. He was _a fool_. He could not blame his plight on others or those who attempted to draw him from his deluded sense of worth, the unknown treasure brought along by the thought of living creatures surely assisted by helpful vegetation, because it was all _him._ He simply could have stayed upon the _Satoshi_ with nothing else to worry about except the condition of his plants, not of his mind and its despondent grip on reality.

He was the cause of his own problems.

He gripped his hair tightly, and nigh screamed if he had the chance to. The frustration flowing though him was now mixed with anxiety, and the admixture was something of abhorrent belief and conception, alienating him from actions of convincing humanity. His nails dug into his scalp as he thought about how all of this could be averted if he didn't make the decisions he did, how his life would probably be so much better on the _Satosh_ i instead of on this damned space shuttle with a goddess of Life who cared for none of her creations just as her beloved Arceus and a god of Death who never wanted to show up unless the situation itself included the disappearance of the blue entity.

Yet what was done was done, and returning was a thing of distant myth. He was sure he wasn't going to find Celebi floating around in the midst of space, just as he had failed to see the legendary Raquaza through the strained clouds when the Satoshi exited the Terran atmosphere and into the gleaming solar system surrounding the singular planet. Some had told him that they had seen it and that he was simply unlucky, but he doubted their credulity; for their evidence wasn't offered when it was asked for. So chances of finding her was slim, especially so far from anyone who knew about it.

Therefore, he had to live with these decisions.

And this _irked_ him.

He hated being despondent when making a choice and having no plan going in because it felt him feel less of a scientist. He had a major in botany, for Arceus's sake, having finished college in the honors program. He was accustomed to generating hypotheses and using the scientific method to whittle them down into a probable conclusion. However, in situations where his passionate emotions took over, he felt deflated and lost of identity, as though his position as an astrobotanist was suddenly taken away due to his actions of rage against Xerneas, keeping himself isolated for more than two months because of treason.

But sometimes, it lent well to the fact that he was, indeed, human. That his humanity wasn't entirely ripped away from him after his mind believed it to be so. Avoiding to make a calculated decision because of abounding emotions that obfuscated his directive didn't make him any less of what he was, he found out. He was mortal, devoid of perfection, fatalistic to the eternal end of life: death. Flaws affected all living things, and he was no exception. Neither was Yvetal, or Xerneas, or even Arceus himself, though the latter two may have deluded themselves throughout their immortal existences. . . .

Then something ripped through the _Hubb_ just as the turbulence ripped Zanz from his reverie. He had not realized that the carbon storm had gotten so close lately, and as he jerked forward and gripped the sides of his chair with eyes widened, he saw it through the glassteel only a kilometer away.

Already, there was evidence of the high winds which encapsulated the storm, as seen by the asteroids flying in every which way into the infinite void of space. One specific asteroid struck the _Hub_ b, though. Zanz saw the glowing red panels of the controls inform him that the right thruster had just taken a massive hit. He cursed, slamming his hands against the armrests. Why did it have to be the thrusters? he thought as he reluctantly emerged from the seat and went onward to retrieve his nanosuit and oxygen mask if another asteroid decided to pierce through the hull of the cockpit and release the oxygen so vital to his life. Xerneas was in the cargo hull near the destruction of the plants, her dim yet emanating aura unaffecting the vegetation which surrounded her. She appeared as though she had just awakened from her sleep by the turbulence, but Zanz said nothing to her as he quickly suited himself up, prepared to enter the carbon storm in front of him.

He strapped back into his hitherto seat, the protective band around his waist keeping him from moving too often whilst the turbulence affected the whole shuttle. With only one of the thrusters available to him, he supposed that he did not have enough time to readjust entry if he waited until he was coming into the lush, green planet's orbit, so fitfully, with the manual controls struggling against his hands, jerking this way and that due to the blowing winds of the unending storm, he powered the left thruster to full exertion after calibrating the adjustment to land off-center of the presumed surface beyond the roaring darkness. He only released point five percent of the fuel tank to make this adjustment, saving the rest for when he entered Erdenwald's orbit and attempted landing a steaming hunk of metal through its atmosphere at speeds unfathomable. The shuttle went a little to the left at this, and began to speed up, having been operating on the previously established speed it achieved before being struck by that damned asteroid.

I hope the Hubb doesn't come into contact with another one of those things, he thought wistfully, holding tight to the controls beneath his calloused fingers.

The heads-up display of the controls counted down the meters leading up towards the carbon storm and when entry was expected. The turbulence increased during this time, having shaken the entirety of the shuttle with another scrape of a dancing asteroid, its rough moves sliding against the dull surface of the metal. He braced himself as the meters displayed fell way beneath five hundred, and Xerneas came out just as it hit one hundred, her face confused and inquisitive.

She asked, "What is going on, Christopher? Are we -"

A stray asteroid suddenly struck the glassteel observing window in front of him, followed by the biggest jostle of the shuttle Zanz had ever experiment. He recoiled as a large, leaking cracks streamed throughout its thick, reinforced surface, gripping the manual controls tightly. His teeth were moving around in his mouth, jumping all about. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, out of the way of his assaulting chompers. The asteroid bounced off immediately after striking, sinking into the obfuscated darkness that now enveloped the entirety of these spacecraft. Relaxed after realizing that no air had been released by this sudden shift, he quickly activated his oxygen mask.

Then a puncture ruptured through the shuttle as an asteroid shot through the top of the ceiling and into the bottom of the shuttle. The jostle this time wasn't as bad, but Zanz could feel the pull of the pressure being released from the craft, his arms attempting to stretch back far enough to accommodate this sudden change. Xerneas screamed at this. Then yet another asteroid pierced through the hull of the ship. One by one, asteroids began ripping through the _Hubb_ , each taking out another piece of the hull and yet another vital component to survival upon the shuttle. Apart it came, the cool metal soon becoming waste to the space around them. As Zanz continued forward with persistence, he was informed by the heads-up display that the left thruster had just taken another hit, but was still semi-functional. He cursed at this, too, blaming all of the gods for this intense transgression upon a ship he spent the well part of two years living in, and spent the rest of the fuel in the system to readjust course, veering off to the side. This engendered more piercings of the ship, and a few scraps of shrapnel had maimed Zanz, one piece flying deep into his shoulder, another embedding itself into his left leg. He screamed all the while, unable to keep the hysterical sound from his mouth any longer, and the sinister sound was manifested of both glee and unbearable agony.

He hoped that the carbon storm didn't last in length for too long, perhaps only a few kilometers, because the glassteel window in front of him was beginning to audibly crack and diminish, its supports weakened by the intense winds which pushed the _Hubb_ significantly off course. Yet nothing could be done about it, he thought. He had tried all that he could, and all that he could think now was how bad his shoulder and leg felt and how maybe Yvetal might grant him eternal suffering for his unwillingness to heed his warnings.

He slumped over in his seat after the pain became too much, passing out as he heard Xerneas scream just as he did.


End file.
